Could Instagram be used to help monitor one's mental health or in screening for depression? A recent study suggests this may just be in our future ...

The study, conducted by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Vermont, analyzed over 43,000 photos posted on Instagram by 166 volunteers. The volunteers were also asked to complete surveys that looked at their social media use, as well as history of mood disorder diagnoses and symptoms of depression.

The results indicated that certain features, such as colour, brightness, and number of faces, of one's online photos may be possible markers for or indicators of depression.

"Those who were depressed tended to post photos with increased hue, decreased brightness, and decreased color saturation. Overall, their photos were “bluer, grayer, and darker.” They also tended to post more frequently and use more Instagram filters, the most popular one for depressed participants being Inkwell, which turns a photo black and white. The most popular filter for volunteers who weren’t depressed was Valencia."
​
To learn more about the study, click here:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1608/1608.03282.pdf
http://fortune.com/2016/08/22/instagram-diagnose-depression/

Chief of Psychiatry at the IWK Health Centre, Dr. Kathleen Pajer along with her research team have helped to "isolate several patterns of genes that identify whether someone has early-onset clinical depression, something that could revolutionize both diagnosis and treatment in children."

In the world of psychiatry, such a finding is immensely exciting as it could eventually lead to the development of a blood test that has the potential to more accurately diagnose depression in young patients. Having a test with those capabilities can lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment which is key to long-term recovery, especially among youth, in addition to helping physicians determine exactly which intervention their patient will respond best to.

"IWK psychiatrist helping to decode kids’ depression" by Laura Fraser (The Chronicle Herald)

It is not uncommon for patients to have multiple comorbidities, including those that are physical as well as mental in origin. As most of us would guess, one illness can often have an impact on other aspects of a patient's life, including making management of other medical conditions more complex, and increasing the risk of developing further health issues.  This sort of relationship has been seen between seizure disorders like #epilepsy and psychiatric disorders. 

In the resource, "Managing Psychiatric Illness in Patients With Epilepsy" by Sowmya C. Puvvada, Satyanarayana Kommisetti, & Abhishek Reddy, readers can learn how to distinguish between features of epilepsy and signs/symptoms of common mental health conditions (such as substance abuse disorders, sleep disorders, and anxiety), discover the links between seizures and mental illness, and learn the preferred management and treatment strategies for depression and psychosis among those with seizure disorders along with gaining other clinical pearls.

"Patients who have epilepsy have a higher incidence of psychiatric illness than the general population—at a prevalence of 60%. Establishing a temporal association and making a psychiatric diagnosis can be vexing, but awareness of potential comorbidities does improve the clinical outcome. As this article discusses, psychiatric presentations and ictal disorders can share common pathology and exacerbate one another. Their coexistence often results in frequent hospitalization, higher treatment cost, and drug-resistant seizures. Risk factors for psychopathology in people who have epilepsy include psychosocial stressors, genetic factors, early age of onset of seizures, and each ictal event.   Among ictal disorders, temporal-lobe epilepsy confers the highest rate of comorbidity" (Current Psychiatry).