AI figured out the word people text when their suicide risk is high

If you were asked to guess the words people use when they're most at risk for suicide, you'd be right to think of obvious nouns and verbs like die, overdose and, yes, the word suicide itself. 

So when Crisis Text Line, a free mental health support service, built an algorithm to flag high-priority texts, it included those among 50 words to indicate the person messaging desperately needed help.

But when Crisis Text Line started using artificial intelligence to analyze the 22 million messages about emotional distress in its database last summer, its researchers made a surprising discovery: The word ibuprofen was 16 times more likely to predict the person texting would need emergency services than the word suicide.  Read more...