Investigating the effectiveness of chatGPT’s storytelling to provide support for postpartum mental health problems

Title: Investigating the effectiveness of chatGPT’s storytelling to provide support for postpartum mental health problems Mentor : Dr. Sabirat Rubya

Summary: Postpartum mood disorders represent a major public health issue in the USA affecting between 10% and 20% of mothers. Approximately 1 in 7 women suffer from postpartum depression (PPD). With recent development of online communities, pregnant women and new mothers often seek social support from online health communities. Our previous research has shown that storytelling has the potential to be a powerful tool for addressing postpartum depression. Sharing stories and listening to others can help women process their emotions and feelings about childbirth and motherhood and feel a sense of community and connection with others.

The use of language models like ChatGPT in storytelling has sparked a lot of interest and debate in the field of natural language processing. ChatGPT is able to generate coherent and emotionally resonant stories, even in different genres (i.e., fantasy, horror, sci-fi, etc.). As an example, when I asked ChatGPT “tell me a short story about postpartum depression in first person that can provide emotional support,” this is the response I got: “I didn't feel the joy I thought I would when my baby was born. Instead, I felt lost, overwhelmed, and like a failure. I didn't know what was wrong with me until my doctor diagnosed me with postpartum depression. With therapy and medication, I started to feel better, but it was still hard. There were moments when I felt like giving up. But I didn't. And now, looking back, I'm grateful for the struggle. It taught me that I'm stronger than I ever knew, and that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. If you're going through this too, know that you're not alone, and that there is hope.” The goal of this study is to use chatGPT to develop stories on PPD that will be used to provide knowledge on symptoms and treatment of PPD and to provide social support. Students on this project will interact with chatGPT to create innovative and engaging story content. These chat-based stories will be converted to interactive videos, and their effectiveness will be evaluated through interviews and surveys.

Preferred Skills (not required): • Interest in developing interviewing and survey design skills • Programming experience for NLP algorithms with Python • Qualitative analysis