40133_mentalhealth_support

Main question:

There are many online communities on Reddit, and mental health related groups have a wide range of followers. While health information sharing and seeking have been known for effectiveness in helping people, we are curious about how online sharing behaviors on Reddit allow people to obtain help to a greater extent with the capacity of social media.

Our specific questions are:

How do different online communities have different support approaches for its followers in the group? Is there some difference between mental health information sharing and other information sharing (say political-related opinion sharing) behaviors?

Data Source: Reddit

Based on the approach of previous studies of Shen and Rudzicz (2017), we divided the primary data sources into two groups.It was collected from various subsections of reddit, one for the mental health support community and one for various other topics of everyday life.

Mental Health Support Group:

1.r/mentalhealth 2.r/mentalillness 3.r/NAMI(s a nationwide organization with excellent support groups) 4.r/socialanxiety 5.r/TalkTherapy 6.r/Anxiety 7.r/SuicideWatch 8.r/Meditation

Control Group:

r/askscience r/writingprompts r/writing r/atheism r/showerthoughts r/lifeprotips r/personalfinance r/theoryofreddit r/randomkindness r/books r/askdocs r/legaladvice r/nostupidquestions r/relationships r/teaching r/parenting r/christianity r/jokes r/writing r/talesfromretail r/talesfromtechsupport r/talesfromcallcenters r/fitness r/frugal r/youshouldknow

Method

1. Data Scraping: Getting data from Reddit
2. Clustering: Analyzing the differences in top words between different types of groups
3. LLMs: Analyzing the sentiments of different communities

References

1. Shen, J.H., Rudzicz, F., 2017. Detecting Anxiety through Reddit, in: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology –- From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality. Presented at the Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology –- From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, Association for Computational Linguistics, Vancouver, BC, pp. 58–65. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-3107