#SPSM Season 3 starts this Sunday! And have we got a treat for you.

Dr. Philip Resnik, @PSResnik, will be chatting with #SPSM, Sunday 8/30/15, at 9pCT, about his ground-breaking applications of Natural Language Process (NLP) to mental health diagnosis and monitoring, via use of publically available social media data.

His work has powerful implications to the field of suicide prevention (as I’m sure he’ll explain)…and he happens to also have a dynamic personality that makes the highly technical field of NLP more accessible to folks who come from a mental health and social sciences background…It also happens that his brilliant wife is a Clinical Psychologist that consults and informs his technical applications. AND, he’s all ours at #SPSM for one hour, this Sunday night. Watch the LIVE stream here.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apKlw2-v6GA

The Tweets for this chat will be archived on Storify.

Additionally, with a new season there is new fun to be had. #SPSM community members can now earn badges each chat: http://www.badgelist.com/SPSMchat …And some outstanding #SPSM members are receiving swag from our cafepress shop. We have groundbreaking guest experts, amazing community members, swag, and BADGES. #SPSM is a full service SoMe community, folks. *wink* Misha Kessler will even be taking an #SPSM flag to the top of Mount Everest this year. Stay tuned for more on that. And be sure to read Dr. Resnik’s bio excerpt below…It’s an inspiration.

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Dr. Philip Resnik is a fancy Computational Linguist, with the most detailed bio we’ve ever linked to (which you are welcome to read). But the BEST part, the reason he is joining #SPSM chat, is this:

“I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the question of impact. Like all academics, I hope to have some kind of lasting intellectual impact, but for me a key goal is to find ways that the things I can do might have a more immediate social impact, as well. I had a conversation about this recently that resulted in the précis below, and I thought I’d add it to my Web page…Language data and mental health. The facts and figures regarding the mental health crisis in this country are staggering; to cite just a few numbers, between 1996 and 2011, annual expenditures on mental disorders rose from $35.2B to $113B, some 25 million American adults will have an episode of major depression this year, suicide is the third leading cause of death for people between 10 and 24 years old, and 89.3 million Americans live in federally-designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas. There is a new, extremely promising line of research that is on the upswing that may help address these issues: using people’s language, e.g. what they say on social media, as a source of evidence for early detection and/or monitoring. Recognizing this as an area where the R&D community is starting to see serious activity, I (working with Rebecca Resnik, a clinical psychologist, and Microsoft researcher Meg Mitchell) instigated the first-ever Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology in Baltimore last year (clpsych.wordpress.com), and this year’s follow-on workshop (clpsych.org) really contributed to the building momentum.”