Computational Objectivity in Depression Assessment for Unstructured Large Datasets

The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) is the depression module, which provides a score correlating to each of the Depression Severity Measure (DSM-IV) criteria, whose output is a total score suggesting which category of depression a patient slots into. In this paper we propose a novel method to potentially improve the current system in place for health professionals in diagnosing depression. Thus, our objective is to propose a more computational method of measurement, similar to the PHQ-9 already in place, with a mathematical ranking system based on a large unstructured dataset consisting of abstracts available from PubMed.