Estimation of Psychological Distress in Japanese Youth Through Narrative Writing: Text-Based Stylometric and Sentiment Analyses.

Youth with tendencies toward mental illness were found to write more positive stories that contained more happiness-related terms. These results may potentially have widespread implications on psychological distress screening on online platforms, particularly in cultures such as Japan that are not accustomed to self-disclosure. Although the mechanisms that we propose in explaining our results are speculative, we believe that this interpretation paves the way for future research in online surveillance and detection efforts.