Quantifying depression-related language on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic had clear impacts on mental health. Social media presents an opportunity for assessing mental health at the population level.

Objectives

1) Identify and describe language used on social media that is associated with discourse about depression. 2) Describe the associations between identified language and COVID-19 incidence over time across several geographies.

Methods

We create a word embedding based on the posts in Reddit's /r/Depression and use this word embedding to train representations of active authors. We contrast these authors against a control group and extract keywords that capture differences between the two groups. We filter these keywords for face validity and to match character limits of an information retrieval system,

SUBMITTER: Davis BD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9052361 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature