Visualizations for mental health topic models

Abstract

Crisis Text Line supports people with mental health issues through texting. Unfortunately, support is limited by the number of counselors and the time each counselor has for clients, as well as the cognitive load on counselors from managing multiple conversations simultaneously. We conducted a contextual inquiry with crisis counselors to find contributing problems in their work flow. We believe topic modeling can provide automatic summaries of conversation text to augment note-taking and transcript-reading. Four simple and familiar visualizations were developed to present the model data: 1) a list of conversation topics, 2) a donut chart of topic percentages, 3) a line chart of topic trends, and 4) a scatter plot of specific topic points in the text. Our hypothesis is that these visualizations will help counselors spend more time on clients without overloading the counselors. The visualizations were evaluated through a user study to determine their effectiveness against a control interface.