We need your help!

We are learning how language usage and language changes may be connected to emotional and psychiatric symptoms. The data you donate will be used by researchers in the departments and laboratory below to help learn how these may be connected.

• Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine
• Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland College Park
• Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory, University of Maryland College Park

This would help inform future studies on what types of data are useful to study, and it may help pave the way for new methods that clinicians could use to pick up on people’s symptoms more quickly, get them help sooner, and work with them more effectively.

As you are signing up we will ask you a few questions about yourself, as well as ask you to allow us to connect to several social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, if you use them, so we can study your language. The researchers will not be able to identify who you are, but even without knowing who you are, your anonymized language in social media will help us understand emotionally how you feel and what kinds of things you talk about. We will also send you some questions to answer weekly for about 6 weeks, and then monthly for six months. We expect to gather data on people with no psychiatric illnesses, and also to include people who have been diagnosed with psychiatric illness.

The data we collect from social media is limited to public posts and to messages that you typically make visible to friends and family on the various social networks. However, researchers will not have any access to information that personally identifies you, your friends, or your family. If you choose to contribute your data, we will use it to build a system that may be able to use language to predict emotion and psychiatric symptoms.

We will never sell this data. This website will not ask you to provide your name, address, date of birth, or any other identifying information. Your data will be protected and the researchers will not know who you are. If you have questions about how we will protect and utilize data, you can contact us directly at umd-support@ourdatahelps.org, and if you like we would be happy to discuss with you, in detail, the respect and care we have for this data and how it can help so many people in the future. The researchers using the results of the data will not have any links to your number or who you are.

Please consider participating in this project.

Sincerely,