2020
DOI: 10.2196/22635
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Natural Language Processing Reveals Vulnerable Mental Health Support Groups and Heightened Health Anxiety on Reddit During COVID-19: Observational Study

Abstract: Background The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting mental health, but it is not clear how people with different types of mental health problems were differentially impacted as the initial wave of cases hit. Objective The aim of this study is to leverage natural language processing (NLP) with the goal of characterizing changes in 15 of the world’s largest mental health support groups (eg, r/schizophrenia, r/SuicideWatch, r/Depression) found on the website Red… Show more

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Cited by 250 publications
(169 citation statements)
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References 15 publications
(12 reference statements)
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“…Second, human assessment was used in 18 studies, with 11 using human annotators to conduct qualitative coding, typically for nuanced mental health information (e.g., type of social support received in Glasgow et al 2016), and 7 studies interpreting a mental health topic from a topic modeling analysis. Next, two studies used mental health forum membership to indicate mental health problems (Low et al, 2020;Saha & De Choudhury, 2017), with Saha and De Choudhury (2017) using the novel method of transfer learning from a classifier trained on a mental health subreddit (r/stress) and a random sample of Reddit posts to identify posts with high stress on college-specific subreddits following gun-related violence on campus. Finally, mental health questionnaires were used in two studies; specifically, the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 in Zhang et al (2020) and PWB Scale in Wang et al (2020).…”
Section: Disaster Mental Health Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…Second, human assessment was used in 18 studies, with 11 using human annotators to conduct qualitative coding, typically for nuanced mental health information (e.g., type of social support received in Glasgow et al 2016), and 7 studies interpreting a mental health topic from a topic modeling analysis. Next, two studies used mental health forum membership to indicate mental health problems (Low et al, 2020;Saha & De Choudhury, 2017), with Saha and De Choudhury (2017) using the novel method of transfer learning from a classifier trained on a mental health subreddit (r/stress) and a random sample of Reddit posts to identify posts with high stress on college-specific subreddits following gun-related violence on campus. Finally, mental health questionnaires were used in two studies; specifically, the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 in Zhang et al (2020) and PWB Scale in Wang et al (2020).…”
Section: Disaster Mental Health Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Finally, a few articles explored specific mental health conditions rather than general negative sentiment (e.g., depression in Sadasivuni & Zhang, 2020;stress in Saha & De Choudhury, 2017;and suicide in Woo et al, 2015). One notable study by Low et al (2020) examined the impact of the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic on 15 mental health support groups on Reddit, allowing for disorder-specific monitoring and comparison. An increase in health anxiety and suicidality was detected across all mental health communities.…”
Section: Disaster Mental Health Applicationsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Before going into the detail, we point out that, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work studying emotionality in social posting, within Reddit, in the COVID-19 context. Nevertheless, different studies revolving around social network analysis, either on Reddit or other platforms, have been presented [23][24][25][26][27][28].…”
Section: Related Workmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…An observational study presented in [27] employed NLP techniques in order to reveal vulnerable mental health support groups on Reddit during COVID-19. In particular, the authors characterized changes in different mental health support subreddits, such as /r/Depression and /r/SuicideWatch, finding that a particular subreddit, /r/HealthAnxiety, showed spikes in posts about COVID-19 early on in January.…”
Section: Related Workmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The most important thing is to recognize the early signs and symptoms for depression and seek support at an early stage. Nowadays, numerous Internet forums and social media platforms enable individuals to contact each other and share their suffering, pain, and potential treatment options anonymously (Low et al, 2020 ). People worldwide can share their ideas and experiences without being exposed (Mühleck et al, 2019 ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%