Depression is a prevalent mental disorder affecting a significant portion of the global population, leading to considerable disability and contributing to the overall burden of disease. Consequently, designing efficient and robust automated methods for depression detection has become imperative. Recently, deep learning methods, especially multimodal fusion methods, have been increasingly used in computer-aided depression detection. Importantly, individuals with depression and those without respond differently to various emotional stimuli, providing valuable information for detecting depression. Building on these observations, we propose an intra- and inter-emotional stimulus transformer-based fusion model to effectively extract depression-related features. The intra-emotional stimulus fusion framework aims to prioritize different modalities, capitalizing on their diversity and complementarity for depression detection. The inter-emotional stimulus model maps each emotional stimulus onto both invariant and specific subspaces using individual invariant and specific encoders. The emotional stimulus-invariant subspace facilitates efficient information sharing and integration across different emotional stimulus categories, while the emotional stimulus specific subspace seeks to enhance diversity and capture the distinct characteristics of individual emotional stimulus categories. Our proposed intra- and inter-emotional stimulus fusion model effectively integrates multimodal data under various emotional stimulus categories, providing a comprehensive representation that allows accurate task predictions in the context of depression detection. We evaluate the proposed model on the Chinese Soochow University students dataset, and the results outperform state-of-the-art models in terms of concordance correlation coefficient (CCC), root mean squared error (RMSE) and accuracy.

Depression endangers people's health conditions and affects the social order as a mental disorder. As an efficient diagnosis of depression, automatic depression detection has attracted lots of researcher's interest. This study presents an attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for depression detection to make full use of the difference between depression and non-depression between timeframes. The proposed model uses frame-level features, which capture the temporal information of depressive speech, to replace traditional statistical features as an input of the LSTM layers. To achieve more multi-dimensional deep feature representations, the LSTM output is then passed on attention layers on both time and feature dimensions. Then, we concat the output of the attention layers and put the fused feature representation into the fully connected layer. At last, the fully connected layer's output is passed on to softmax layer. Experiments conducted on the DAIC-WOZ database demonstrate that the proposed attentive LSTM model achieves an average accuracy rate of 90.2% and outperforms the traditional LSTM network and LSTM with local attention by 0.7% and 2.3%, respectively, which indicates its feasibility.

Social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have altered our world forever. People are now increasingly connected than ever and reveal a sort of digital persona. Although social media certainly has several remarkable features, the demerits are undeniable as well. Recent studies have indicated a correlation between high usage of social media sites and increased depression. The present study aims to exploit machine learning techniques for detecting a probable depressed Twitter user based on both, his/her network behavior and tweets. For this purpose, we trained and tested classifiers to distinguish whether a user is depressed or not using features extracted from his/her activities in the network and tweets. The results showed that the more features are used, the higher are the accuracy and F-measure scores in detecting depressed users. This method is a data-driven, predictive approach for early detection of depression or other mental illnesses. This study's main contribution is the exploration part of the features and its impact on detecting the depression level.

Depression is a major mental health problem in Thailand. The depression rates have been rapidly increasing. Over 1.17 million Thai people suffer from this mental illness. It is important that a reliable depression screening tool is made available so that depression could be early detected. Given Facebook is the most popular social network platform in Thailand, it could be a large-scale resource to develop a depression detection tool. This research employs techniques to develop a depression detection algorithm for the Thai language on Facebook where people use it as a tool for sharing opinions, feelings, and life events. To establish the reliable result, Thai Mental Health Questionnaire (TMHQ), a standardized psychological inventory that measures major mental health problems including depression. Depression scale of the TMHQ comprises of 20 items, is used as the baseline for concluding the result. Furthermore, this study also aims to do factor analysis and reduce the number of depression items. Data was collected from over 600 Facebook users. Descriptive statistics, Exploratory Factor Analysis, and Internal consistency were conducted. Results provide the optimized version of the TMHQ-depression that contain 9 items. The 9 items are categorized into four factors which are suicidal ideation, sleep problems, anhedonic, and guilty feelings. Internal consistency analysis shows that this short version of the TMHQ-depression has good to excellent reliability (Cronbach's alpha >.80). The findings suggest that this optimized TMHQ-depression questionnaire holds a good psychometric property and can be used for depression detection.