People with depression use language differently – here ’ s how to spot it
From the way you move and sleep , to how you interact with people around you , depression changes just about everything . It is even noticeable in the way you speak and express yourself in writing . Sometimes this “ language of depression ” can have a powerful effect on others . Just consider the impact of the poetry and song lyrics of Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain , who both killed themselves after suffering from depression .
Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language , and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture . Our new study , published in Clinical Psychological Science , has now unveiled a class of words that can help accurately predict whether someone is suffering from depression .
Traditionally , linguistic analyses in this field have been carried out by researchers reading and taking notes . Nowadays , computerised text analysis methods allow the processing of extremely large data banks in minutes . This can help spot linguistic features which humans may miss , calculating the percentage prevalence of words and classes of words , lexical diversity , average sentence length , grammatical patterns and many other metrics .
So far ,
personal essays and
diary entries by depressed people have been useful , as has the work of well-known artists such as
Cobain and
Plath . For the spoken word , snippets of
natural language of people with depression have also provided insight . Taken together , the findings from such research