PsihoRo: Depression and Anxiety Romanian Text Corpus

Abstract

Psychological corpora in NLP are collections of texts used to analyze human psychology, emotions, and mental health. These texts allow researchers to study psychological constructs, identify patterns related to mental health problems and analyze emotional language. However, collecting accurate mental health data from social media can be challenging due to the assumptions made by data collectors. A more effective approach involves gathering data through open-ended questions and then assessing participants' mental health status using self-report screening surveys. This method was successfully employed for English, a language with a lot of psychological NLP resources. However, the same cannot be stated for Romanian, which currently has no open-source mental health corpus. To address this gap, we have collected the first open-source corpus focused on depression and anxiety in Romanian, by utilizing a form with 6 open-ended questions along with the standardized PHQ-9 and GAD-7 screening questionnaires. Although the PsihoRo corpus contains texts from only 205 respondents, it represents an important first step toward understanding and analyzing mental health issues within the Romanian population. We employ statistical analysis, text analysis using Romanian LIWC, emotion detection, and topic modeling to identify the most important features of this newly introduced resource for the NLP community. The data is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Alegzandra/PsihoRo.