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In the future, people seeking to make an appointment may need to leave a link to their Facebook account. That is because, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Missouri, researchers have found that Facebook activity may be indicative of mental illness - as if you needed another reason to check your privacy settings.

According to CNET, researchers tasked 211 college students with responding to a questionnaire. This questionnaire, which asked students to agree or disagree with strange statements like "Some people can make me aware of them just by thinking of me", tested participants for schizotypy. The condition has an assortment of conditions, like social withdrawal, paranoia, magical ideation, social anhedonia and perceptual aberration. Social anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure from social situations, while perceptual aberration and magical thinking involve the grasp of unusual beliefs and nearly psychotic distortions.

After submitting the questionnaire, the researchers requested access to the students' Facebook pages. LiveScience reports that the students were informed that they could conceal access to pages that they did not want the researchers to see before the psychologists printed their Facebook pages out.

Researchers found that students whose questionnaires indicated that they had social anhedonia also had Facebook profiles to reflect that fact. In particular, they had fewer pictures, fewer friends and took more time to respond to their friends' communications.

The concealment of pictures also betrayed information to the researchers. In fact, the students who concealed more information also more often displayed perceptual aberration, magical ideation and higher amounts of paranoia.

"The beauty of social media activity as a tool in psychological diagnosis is that it removes some of the problems associated with patients' self-reporting," study leather Elizabeth Martin explained in a statement. "For example, questionnaires often depend on a person's memory, which may or may not be accurate. By asking patients to share their Facebook activity, we were able to see how they expressed themselves naturally. Even the parts of their Facebook activities that they chose to conceal exposed information about their psychological state."

The study was published in the journal Psychiatric Research.