Analyzing Depression in College Students Using NLP and Transformer Models: Implications for Career and Educational Counseling

Purpose

Depression among college students is a growing concern that negatively affects academic performance, emotional well-being, and career planning. Existing diagnostic methods are often slow, subjective, and inaccessible, underscoring the need for automated systems that can detect depressive symptoms through digital behavior, particularly on social media platforms.

Method

This study proposes a novel natural language processing (NLP) framework that combines a RoBERTa-based Transformer with gated recurrent unit (GRU) layers and multimodal embeddings. The Transformer captures nuanced language patterns, while the GRU layers account for the sequence of user posts over time. Multimodal embeddings—including behavioral, temporal, and contextual metadata—enhance the model's ability to interpret subtle emotional cues in social media posts.

Findings

The model was evaluated on real-world datasets from Twitter and Reddit, achieving an accuracy of 90.18% in classifying depressive versus non-depressive posts. It also demonstrated consistently high performance across both simple and complex sentence types. Statistical comparison with several baseline models confirmed the superiority of the proposed method, particularly over traditional deep learning architectures.

Conclusion

By enabling real-time detection of depressive signals in social media content, the proposed framework can serve as a practical tool in academic and career counseling. It supports early identification of at-risk students and facilitates timely interventions, contributing to improved student well-being, retention, and long-term success.