Can the way we describe our life experiences predict whether we will feel more depressed in the future? We asked participants to write about their experiences from the past two weeks and complete a standard questionnaire assessing depressive symptoms, with a follow-up questionnaire administered three weeks later. Emotional tone of written responses assessed by human raters predicted changes in depression when controlling for both current depressive symptoms and current mood. AI tools matched human performance, suggesting an automated procedure for predicting future psychiatric symptoms from brief linguistic responses.