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 Reddit, along with 11 non-mental health groups (eg, r/PersonalFinance, r/conspiracy) during the initial stage of the pandemic.

Methods

We created and released the Reddit Mental Health Dataset including posts from 826,961 unique users from 2018 to 2020. Using regression, we analyzed trends from 90 text-derived features such

SUBMITTER: Low DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7575341 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature