The paper, titled A Social Media Study on the Effects of Psychiatric Medication Use, was presented by IC Ph.D. student Koustuv Saha and included fellow IC Ph.D. student Benjamin Sugar and IC Assistant Professor Munmun De Choudhury. Collaborators from Microsoft Research, Harvard Medical School, and New York University-Shanghai were also involved with the research.

The research addresses a challenge in understanding the effects of psychiatric medications during mental health treatment. While clinical trials help to evaluate effects of the medication, there are challenges in generalizing trials to broader populations. Using a list of common approved and regulated psychiatric medications and a Twitter dataset of 300 million posts from 30,000 individuals, researchers developed machine learning models to first assess effects relating to mood, cognition, depression, anxiety, psychosis, and suicidal ideation and then, based on a score, observe how use of specific drugs are associated with characteristic changes in an individual’s psychopathology.

The goal of this research is a deeper understanding of effects and how to situate those with treatment outcomes.

ICWSM is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This includes social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. In its 13^th year of existence, the conference has become one of the premier venues for computational social science.