time.

Impediments such as social stigma associated with mental disorders, lack of

trained health-care professionals and ignorance of the signs of depression owing to
a lack of awareness of the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests
that people who are depressed are regularly not correctly diagnosed and others s
who are misdiagnosed are prescribed antidepressants. Thus, there is a strong need
to automatically assess the risk of depression. Social media platforms increasingly
come closer to become a true digitization of the human social experience. In many
cases people would in fact prefer to express themselves online than offline. In
this paper, we are using Facebook comments as data set, and based on it
categorizing the users as depressed or non-depressed

CHAPTER 1
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Depression is a common mental illness and a leading cause of disability worldwide,
which may cause suicides. Globally, more than 300 million people are estimated to
suffer from depression every year1 Generally, depression is diagnosed through face-
to-face clinical depression criteria. However, at early stages of depression, 70%
of the patients would not consult doctors, which