Whether you realize it or not, you leave a trail of clues about your mental health on social media. Emerging research suggests that words, characters, and even emoji can reveal information about people's moods and mental well-being.

Doctors don't have visibility into our lives the way our mobile phone does.

In a new study published in EPJ Data Science, two researchers accessed the Instagram accounts of 166 volunteers and then applied machine learning to their collective 43,950 images in order to identify and predict depression. By comparing those predictions to each individual's clinical diagnosis, the researchers discovered that their model outperformed the average rate of physicians accurately diagnosing depression in patients.

Photos posted by depressed users were more often bluer, darker, and grayer, hues that previous research has associated with negative mood. They also were less likely to use Instagram filters, but disproportionately chose the black-and-white "Inkwell" filter when they did take advantage of the tool. In contrast, "healthy" participants favored the tint-lightening "Valencia" filter. Meanwhile, the more comments a post received, the more likely someone with depression had posted it.

Read the source article at Mashable