Jones, Lauren Stephanie, Anderson, Emma, Loades, Maria et al. · Clinical psychology & psychotherapy · 2020 · DOI
This study looked at whether doctors could use the words young people write in online therapy messages to figure out if they also have depression alongside ME/CFS. Researchers developed a system to analyze language patterns in 16 teenagers' messages, but found it didn't work very well at identifying depression compared to standard depression screening tests. A few language patterns showed promise—for example, teenagers with depression used more words about the past and fewer words showing mixed feelings—but the method overall wasn't reliable enough to be useful.
Depression commonly co-occurs with ME/CFS in adolescents and affects treatment outcomes, yet it's often underdiagnosed in online therapy settings. Developing objective linguistic markers could help clinicians more readily identify youth needing mental health intervention. This early-stage research contributes to understanding how language patterns might signal depression in chronic illness populations.
This study does not prove that linguistic analysis cannot identify depression in ME/CFS—the small sample size (n=16) and preliminary nature of the coding scheme limit generalizability. The findings do not establish causation between language use and depression, only associations. The poor overall accuracy means this method cannot yet be recommended for clinical use without substantial further development.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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Primary citation
Jones, Lauren Stephanie, Anderson, Emma, Loades, Maria, Barnes, Rebecca, & Crawley, Esther (2020). Can linguistic analysis be used to identify whether adolescents with a chronic illness are depressed?. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.2417
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-jones-2020-can-linguistic,
author = {Jones, Lauren Stephanie and Anderson, Emma and Loades, Maria and Barnes, Rebecca and Crawley, Esther},
title = {Can linguistic analysis be used to identify whether adolescents with a chronic illness are depressed?},
journal = {Clinical psychology & psychotherapy},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.1002/cpp.2417},
note = {PubMed: 31840339},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/jones-2020-can-linguistic},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-29. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/jones-2020-can-linguistic
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