Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data

Claire Lee, Noelle Lim, Michael Guerzhoy


Abstract
We present a novel task that can elucidate the connection between anxiety and ADHD; use Transformers to make progress toward solving a task that is not solvable by keyword-based classifiers; and discuss a method for visualization of our classifier illuminating the connection between anxiety and ADHD presentations. Up to approximately 50% of adults with ADHD may also have an anxiety disorder and approximately 30% of adults with anxiety may also have ADHD. Patients presenting with anxiety may be treated for anxiety without ADHD ever being considered, possibly affecting treatment. We show how data that bears on ADHD that is comorbid with anxiety can be obtained from social media data, and show that Transformers can be used to detect a proxy for possible comorbid ADHD in people with anxiety symptoms. We collected data from anxiety and ADHD online forums (subreddits). We identified posters who first started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and later started posting in the ADHD subreddit as well. We use this subset of the posters as a proxy for people who presented with anxiety symptoms and then became aware that they might have ADHD. We fine-tune a Transformer architecture-based classifier to classify people who started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and then started posting in the ADHD subreddit vs. people who posted in the Anxiety subreddit without later posting in the ADHD subreddit. We show that a Transformer architecture is capable of achieving reasonable results (76% correct for RoBERTa vs. under 60% correct for the best keyword-based model, both with 50% base rate).
Anthology ID:
2024.clpsych-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Andrew Yates, Bart Desmet, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Ayah Zirikly, Steven Bedrick, Sean MacAvaney, Kfir Bar, Molly Ireland, Yaakov Ophir
Venues:
CLPsych | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
172–176
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claire Lee, Noelle Lim, and Michael Guerzhoy. 2024. Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024), pages 172–176, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data (Lee et al., CLPsych-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.14.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.14.mp4