AI in the Wild: A Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Depression Detection from Social Media Data

Abstract

As AI moves into high-stakes, human-centered settings, we still lack clear evidence on when and why these systems succeed or fail. This meta-analysis synthesizes all empirical studies published between 2022 and 2025 that use social-media data to predict depression, quantifying pooled accuracy and testing study-level moderators. By showing how data sources and model architecture shape outcomes, we offer an empirical foundation for a more reliable, socially aware deployment of AI in mental health. Across 67 studies, overall performance is strong (pooled r ≈ 0.80) and climbs even higher in 2024, driven by deep, transformer-based and multimodal systems. The gains, however, are uneven: post-level binary detectors improve the most, user-level severity estimation still lags, and results hinge as much on label provenance and platform context as on model size—highlighting a persistent gap between leaderboard success and clinically meaningful reliability. To address that gap, we propose a Psych-Aligned Evaluation Framework that maps predictions onto validated symptom dimensions and adds three deployment-critical tests—PHQ error, temporal stability, and clinician agreement. This framework converts single-number benchmarks into a multidimensional yardstick for real-world, psychologically meaningful depression detection.