Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34939068›Full record

ArticleFrontiers in digital health2021

Listening to Mental Health Crisis Needs at Scale: Using Natural Language Processing to Understand and Evaluate a Mental Health Crisis Text Messaging Service.

Zhaolu Liu, Robert L Peach, Emma L Lawrance, Ariele Noble, Mark A Ungless, Mauricio Barahona

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Frontiers in digital health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
9citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
2.9field-weighted citation impact, top 9% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 19 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Article
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  5. Article
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  7. Review
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  9. Observational
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

Zhaolu LiuDepartment of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Robert L PeachDepartment of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Emma L LawranceInstitute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Ariele NobleMental Health Innovations, London, United Kingdom.
Mark A UnglessMental Health Innovations, London, United Kingdom.
Mauricio BarahonaDepartment of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Imperial College London · GBUniversitätsklinikum Würzburg · DE

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The current mental health crisis is a growing public health issue requiring a large-scale response that cannot be met with traditional services alone. Digital support tools are proliferating, yet most are not systematically evaluated, and we know little about their users and their needs. Shout is a free mental health text messaging service run by the charity Mental Health Innovations, which provides support for individuals in the UK experiencing mental or emotional distress and seeking help. Here we study a large data set of anonymised text message conversations and post-conversation surveys compiled through Shout. This data provides an opportunity to hear at scale from those experiencing distress; to better understand mental health needs for people not using traditional mental health services; and to evaluate the impact of a novel form of crisis support. We use natural language processing (NLP) to assess the adherence of volunteers to conversation techniques and formats, and to gain insight into demographic user groups and their behavioural expressions of distress. Our textual analyses achieve accurate classification of conversation stages (weighted accuracy = 88%), behaviours (1-hamming loss = 95%) and texter demographics (weighted accuracy = 96%), exemplifying how the application of NLP to frontline mental health data sets can aid with

Indexed as

crisisdeep learningdigital mental healthmachine learningmental healthnatural language processingtransformers

Identifiers

PMID34939068
PMCPMC8685221
OpenAlexW4226336469

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.