Lauren Hyer

Jackie Burr, Instructor

English 2010

27 March 2019

Notebook 4
For my English 2010 Report, I decided to research articles about how social media can affect
mental health. The specific article that I studied was called “Predicting Depressions via Social
Media” by Munmun De Choudhury. This article was based on an experiment that had on the
diagnosing most forms of mental illnesses. They found that there is no reliable lab that could
really come up with a solid diagnosis, it is typically just the patient’s “self-reported experiences”
that they have been through. Most of the information that De Choudhury collected was from
crowdsourcing. A lot of these people that have been diagnosed with clinical MDD (Major
Depressive Disorder) are what this article is about.

Some of the strategies that he uses consists of the format and style, he has a little abstract
paragraph that gives a little background on the topic which I thought was pretty cool. There is
also a lot of different subtitles, and for those subtitles it talks about different processes such as:
what comes with depression, how to deal with depression, the different emotions that come with
it, and predicting depressive behavior. The way he constructs his work puts a different
perspective on writing.

Other than the different subtitles, De Choudhury incorporated different graphs to show his
studies, and results that he has researched. These graphs put a picture into the reader’s head as
they are learning about these illnesses that people get diagnosed with. I plan to incorporate this
technique as well, because it draws attention to whoever the reader is.