Analyzing Depression in College Students Using NLP and Transformer Models: Implications for Career and Educational Counseling
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: PURPOSE: Depression among college students is a growing concern that negatively affects academic performance, emotional well-being, and career planning. Existing diagnostic methods are often slow, subjective, and inaccessible, underscoring the need for automated systems that can detect depressive symptoms through digital behavior, particularly on social media platforms. METHOD: This study proposes a novel natural language processing (NLP) framework that combines a RoBERTa-based Transformer with gated recurrent unit (GRU) layers and multimodal embeddings. The Transformer captures nuanced language patterns, while the GRU layers account for the sequence of user posts over time. Multimodal embeddings-including behavioral, temporal, and contextual metadata-enhance the model's ability to interpret subtle emotional cues in social media posts. FINDINGS: The model was evaluated on real-world datasets from Twitter and Reddit, achieving an accuracy of 90.18% in classifying depressive versus non-depressive posts. It also demonstrated consistently high performance across both simple and complex sentence types. Statistical comparison with several baseline models confirmed the superiority of the proposed method, particularly over traditional deep learning architectures. CONCLUSION: By enabling real-time detection of depressive signals in social media content, the proposed framework can serve as a practical tool in academic and career counseling. It supports early identification of at-risk students and facilitates timely interventions, contributing to improved student well-being, retention, and long-term success.
Source: Brain and Behavior
DOI: 10.1002/brb3.70828
Authors: Qiuxia Wan, Yue Pan, Sonia Zakeri
Institutions: Chengdu Sport University, University of Tabriz
Language: English
Topic: Mental Health via Writing
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,630
OpenAlex ID: W4414082128