Abstract
BackgroundVast numbers of domestic violence (DV) incidents are attended by the New South Wales Police Force each year in New South Wales and recorded as both structured quantitative data and unstructured free text in the WebCOPS (Web-based interface for the Computerised Operational Policing System) database regarding the details of the incident, the victim, and person of interest (POI). Although the structured data are used for reporting purposes, the free text remains untapped for DV reporting and surveillance purposes.ObjectiveIn this paper, we explore whether text mining can automatically identify mental health disorders from this unstructured text.MethodsWe used a training set of 200 DV recorded events to design a knowledge-driven approach based on lexical patterns in text suggesting mental health disorders for POIs and victims.ResultsThe precision returned from an evaluation set of 100 DV events was 97.5% and 87.1% for mental health disorders related to POIs and victims, respectively. After applying our approach to a large-scale corpus of almost a half million DV events, we identified 77,995 events (15.83%) that mentioned mental health disorders, with 76.96% (60,032/77,995) of those linked to POIs versus 16.47% (12,852/77,995) for the victims and 6.55% (5111/77,995) for both. Depression was the most common mental health disorder mentioned in both victims (22.25%, 3269) and POIs (18.70%, 8944), followed by alcohol abuse for POIs (12.19%, 5829) and various anxiety disorders (eg, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder) for victims (11.66%, 1714).ConclusionsThe results suggest that text mining can automatically extract targeted information from police-recorded DV events to support further public health research into the nexus between mental health disorders and DV.
Highlights
Specific isolated phobiasOther phobic anxiety disorders Phobic anxiety disorder, unspecified Panic disorder Generalised anxiety disorder Anxiety disorder, unspecified Hoarding disorder Excoriation disorder Obsessive compulsive disorder, unspecified Acute stress reaction Post-traumatic stress disorder Adjustment disorders Dissociative amnesia Dissociative fugue Dissociative stupor Other dissociative and conversion disorders Dissociative and conversion disorder, unspecified Somatization disorder Undifferentiated somatoform disorder.
Abuse of steroids or hormonesParanoid personality disorder Schizoid personality disorder Antisocial personality disorder Borderline personality disorder Histrionic personality disorder Obsessive compulsive personality disorder Avoidant personality disorder Dependent personality disorder Other specific personality disorders Personality disorder, unspecified Pathological gambling Pyromania Kleptomania Trichotillomania Other impulse disorders Impulse disorder, unspecified
Traumatic brain injuryConduct disorder, unspecified Oppositional defiant disorder Separation anxiety disorder of childhood Selective mutism Reactive attachment disorder of childhood Disinhibited attachment disorder of childhood Transient tic disorder Chronic motor or vocal tic disorder Tourette's disorder Unspecified behavioural and emotional disorders
Summary
Other phobic anxiety disorders Phobic anxiety disorder, unspecified Panic disorder Generalised anxiety disorder Anxiety disorder, unspecified Hoarding disorder Excoriation disorder Obsessive compulsive disorder, unspecified Acute stress reaction Post-traumatic stress disorder Adjustment disorders Dissociative amnesia Dissociative fugue Dissociative stupor Other dissociative and conversion disorders Dissociative and conversion disorder, unspecified Somatization disorder Undifferentiated somatoform disorder.
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