Insights on mental health when living with rheumatoid arthritis: a descriptive qualitative study of threads on the Reddit website.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Reddit is a highly visited social news and discussion website where individuals anonymously ask questions, post opinions and share experiences, which provide a valuable pool of publicly available data. Our objective was to systematically search and analyze threads on the social news website, Reddit, to understand experiences of individuals with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) regarding their mental health.

Methods

We conducted a patient-oriented descriptive qualitative study. We identified threads from two subreddits, "r/Thritis" and "r/Rheumatoid", using keywords such as "mood", "mental health", "stressed", "depressed", "anxious" over a 1-year period between June 2018 and June 2019. For included threads, we extracted the title, original post, and corresponding comments

SUBMITTER: Park JYE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7690206 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature