How we can use Twitter data to better understand weather-related depression

The weather can have a profound influence on many people’s emotional states, but until now it has been difficult to quantify these effects. The advent of social media has now made it much easier to explore the relationship between seasonality and the prevalence of depression. In new research which uses data from more than 600 million tweets over a one year period, Wei Yang, along with Lan Mu and Ye Shen find that climate risk factors for depression are different and localized, depending on the area in question. They write that using such social media data has benefits over traditional data collecting methods, and may have the potential to transform clinical practice for some diseases.