The problem Merry Cacti solves

Mental health is a stigma in the so called modern society of ours, where people cannot talk about their problems and grievances openly and express themselves. Around 6.7 percent of the U.S. adult population suffer from one or the other mental disease which is often neglected. There are hundreds and thousands of people out there who require attention and need someone to support them. Therefore, we present to you Merry Cacti, your companion which promises comfort and compasion.

We created this application to help the users suffering from mental health illness and comfort them. Merry Cacti is a reddit bot which finds the user's post which implies depressive and self destructive sentiments and replies happy thoughts and redirects them to our website where we provide a platform to help such users express themselves anonymously and help each other using a subreddit.

We at first extracted the data to train our model by using the reddit json file and then process the data to create a final csv file. We used nltk and spacy to pre-process the Reddit post text data and analyse if the text is suicidal or depressive, and comment on the post accordingly. We created a website where people can view our bot replies on Reddit and chat with our bot integrated into the website.

Challenges we ran into

Extracting the data for training the model.
Pre-processing the model
Creating a chat-bot for the website and integrating it.
Using reddit API json file to create embeds of the replies and posts for the website.