Paper Title
A Leading Indicator for Teenage Mental Health

Abstract
Abstract - The Pandemic exasperated the growing rate of teen suicides, as has been called out by the WHO, CDC, NYT, Oxford Academic Journal, and various other sources. Teenage mental health is a key area where every secondary school is investing a significant part of their resources to curb suicide and other negative side effects of mental health. Teenage mental health issues usually go undetected until they become critical as they are abstract and due to the stigma associated with talking about them at school or at home. Studies have shown that these issues can be dealt with and treated much more easily and effectively if they are detected early on. Computers and mobile phones have become an integral part of the education system in the recent past and the pandemic made them a much stronger dependency. Schools started issuing laptops to provide equitable education experiences to their students. Given the recent trends in mobile phone and computer usage, there is a significant amount of data that flows across the network, which has rich information. This data can be mined to extract patterns that can act as key leading indicators of mental health issues, and allow for schools to detect and act on them sooner than later. This paper discusses an approach where a service/agent can be installed on the electronic devices which simply collects the words that the user/student types on their electronic device, classifies the word into a category, and keeps track of the count of the words the user is using in each category. A word cloud can be created from these words, which is indicative of the emotional state of the student. This information can be used as a leading indicator by counselors and teachers to probe further and offer help in a timely manner to struggling teenagers. Keywords - Mental Health, Healthcare, e-healthcare, AI, Analytics, COVID-19, Suicide, Emotions, Stress