Comments on: Internet usage patterns may signify depression

By: James grills

James grills — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 12:10:11 +0000

Great job with the article. Depression can be tracked through many day to day activities and the usage of internet is one amongst them. the content derived through research is great in this post.

By: Kiran

Kiran — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:47:28 +0000

Rather than criticize the study for being too obtrusive, I felt that it missed too much context in its efforts to remain impartial and only analyze general data. I obviously haven't seen the whole study yet, but if you're interested, there's a counterpoint to the NYTimes opinion piece at http://fueled.com/blog/the-not-so-depressing-truth-about-the-internet/

By: Austin R. Range

Austin R. Range — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 17:05:06 +0000

This study was also mentioned on CNN today, well done.

By: Sriram

Sriram — Wed, 23 May 2012 07:33:18 +0000

I am one of the researchers in the study. The research was approved formally at Missouri S&T since procedures were placed to ensure students were not identified, contents of email, chat, ftp etc. were never captured, and IP addresses were never processed. I am not sure of the comment “People have friends in different areas and people leave certain social networks up constantly while doing homework”. We make NO conclusions on social network usage among students. Please see footnote on Page 2 of the paper at http://web.mst.edu/~chellaps/papers/12_tech-soc_kcmwl.pdf. What we process are mere statistics of Internet usage. Also, we are not saying that the patterns identified are the same for EACH individual. We only conclude that they are significant in a statistical sense.
Also, responding to the comment “we believe the information to be inaccurate”, existing studies do support our findings. There are many if you search online with right keywords. What we did unique was to use real Internet data (again, we use only statistics).
Also, we agree that there are privacy concerns. Before any such software will be created to assess mental health problems, there is too much work to be done addressing a number of issues like privacy, ethics, false positives and negatives etc. What we only show in this study is a feasibility.
Feel free to talk to me should you have more questions.

By: Caleb Wilczynski

Caleb Wilczynski — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:29:54 +0000

I would just like to say a lot students disagree with this on grounds of it being obtrusive, and we believe the information to be inaccurate. People have different needs and wants, and the internet provides certain needs unlike campus. People have friends in different areas and people leave certain social networks up constantly while doing homework. All people are not the same and trying to make us all fit a prescribed mold of “happiness” that is the same for everyone is unintelligent. Oh; we are all on one of those “social networks” discussing this article right now……

By: Thomas Mueller

Thomas Mueller — Mon, 21 May 2012 21:20:46 +0000

The downside of all this is invasion of privacy and making Internet users overanxious about how their Internet usage patterns will be used against them: a remedy that could be worse than the disease (depression in this case).