In case of another pandemic, authorities might only have a 28-day window to connect vulnerable populations to mental health providers before it’s too late to prevent long-term concerns, according to new research assisted by a data science expert at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The research employed five types of natural-language processing and statistical methods to evaluate more than 350,000 posts in the Reddit subcommunities r/Anxiety and r/Depression, spanning the years 2019-2022, in response to the worldwide dire news and eventual waning of COVID. NJIT Associate Professor Hai Phan was a co-principal investigator along with four people from Kent State University, located in northeast Ohio. To read the full story.