A recent study, carried out by the Crisis Text Line (CTL), has discovered a range of words that can indicate mental illness when used in text messages.

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CTL analysed 33 million messages from users communicating with its text-based counseling hotline and what they discovered is that words such as ‘sometimes’, ‘hard’, ‘feeling’ and ‘guess’ are often used by people who are in distress or at risk of self harm. In addition, words such as ‘mum’ and ‘parents’ also indicated stress.

They also discovered that a crying emoji was more reliable for indicating mental illness than the word ‘suicide’. Chief data scientist Bob Filbin said:

Before we used the computer, we had a list of 50 words that (we thought) were probably indicative of high risk. Words like ‘die,’ ‘cut,’ ‘suicide,’ ‘kill,’ etc.

When a data scientist ran the analysis, he found thousands of words and phrases indicative of an active rescue that are actually more predictive.

That’s the whole idea and the power, really, of AI – it gets smarter over time.

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So there you have it. If you sometimes write about your mum, or you sometimes found it hard to get over stress, then you might want to evaluate your mental health situation… I guess.

To read about the time a comedian used his text messages to completely ruin the life of a woman who called him eager, click HERE.