iSPEAK: a Natural Language Processing Study in youth with subclinical psychotic experiences

ongoing

Up to one fifth of young people report that they have experienced unusual perceptual experiences, thoughts or beliefs. These experiences (which we call Psychotic Experiences or PE) can take the form of hearing voices or seeing visions or feeling paranoid or believing things that are not true. As part of my ERC Consolidator Award (iHEAR), I and my team have learned a great deal more about these experiences and what they mean for young people. We know that these experiences can be transitory in most cases but that in some young people they recur throughout adolescence and adulthood. We know that, for some young people, these experiences can be associated with poor functioning and poorer mental health but for others they are not pathological. We have identified the need for an instrument that can differentiate between pathological and non-pathological psychotic experiences. This will support early risk screening and development of interventions among those who experience PE. We propose to search for natural language patterns within self-reported PE that are associated with high and low levels of mental ill-health. Our hypothesis is that young people’s first person account of their experiences are likely to contain natural language phrases that could be used to differentiate between PEs that occur in the context of mental ill-health are likely to require intervention and those that do not. Knowledge of natural language patterns for PE would be a valuable step in improving assessment tools in clinical practice. Additionally this could be a valuable new resource for digital tools and e-Health which is a growing area for mental health.