Madanian, SamanehGao, Yuan2025-08-212025-08-212025-08-07Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, ISSN: 0926-9630 (Print); 0926-9630 (Online), IOS Press, 329, 1948-1949. doi: 10.3233/SHTI2512930926-96300926-9630http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19709Depression is a pervasive mental health disorder affecting millions globally. The rise of social networks and their digital footprint provides a unique avenue to leverage AI for early identification of users who may be suffering. We built upon BERT for feature extraction from individual user posts, followed by a Convolutional Neural Network for classification. Since the pre-trained BERT model may not effectively capture social media language, we propose an approach to pre-train BERT on Reddit data before integrating it into the BERT+CNN architecture.© 2025 The Authors. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).AIDepressionDigital HealthDigital Mental HealthNLPAIDepressionDigital HealthDigital Mental HealthNLP46 Information and Computing Sciences4608 Human-Centred ComputingMental IllnessPreventionMental HealthDepressionBehavioral and Social ScienceBrain DisordersMachine Learning and Artificial IntelligenceMental health3 Good Health and Well Being0807 Library and Information Studies1117 Public Health and Health ServicesMedical Informatics4203 Health services and systems4601 Applied computingData MiningDepressionHumansMental HealthNatural Language ProcessingNeural Networks, ComputerSocial MediaHumansSocial MediaDepressionNeural Networks, ComputerMental HealthNatural Language ProcessingData MiningHumansDepressionMental HealthNatural Language ProcessingData MiningSocial MediaNeural Networks, ComputerHumansSocial MediaDepressionNeural Networks, ComputerMental HealthNatural Language ProcessingData MiningJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.3233/SHTI251293