Using Open-Ended Stressor Responses to Predict Depressive Symptoms across Demographics

Abstract

Stressors are related to depression, but this relationship is complex. We investigate the relationship between open-ended text responses about stressors and depressive symptoms across gender and racial/ethnic groups. First, we use topic models and other NLP tools to find thematic and vocabulary differences when reporting stressors across demographic groups. We train language models using self-reported stressors to predict depressive symptoms, finding a relationship between stressors and depression. Finally, we find that differences in stressors translate to downstream performance differences across demographic groups.