The language of mental health problems in social media
Online social media, including sites such as Reddit, has become an important platform to share and discuss personal experiences. On Reddit, there are forums dedicated to specific topics, so-called subreddits, where users can interact with each other. Many of these subreddits are about mental health-related issues, such as anxiety, depression, suicide watch, and bipolarity. This type of information is a rich resource for mental health research, as it contains posts written directly by users. With large-scale linguistic analysis, it is possible to detect language characteristics specific to mental health. These can be used to develop tools that are able to classify posts. For instance, when someone announces their intentions of ending their life by suicide or of harming others, such a tool could automatically issue an alert. This study presents initial findings on applying linguistic analysis on mental health-related subreddits, and shows that features such as complexity of sentences, word usage and positive or negative feelings can be informative for further large-scale analysis and tool development.
Figure shows results from the comparison of the language between pairs of subreddits. More specifically, for each pair, a high value corresponds to high language discriminability.
Here’s a link to the full paper
PHEME RTE dataset Ontological Modelling of Rumors
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[…] Online social media, including sites such as Reddit, has become an important platform to share and discuss personal experiences. On Reddit, there are forums dedicated to specific topics, so-called subreddits, where users can interact with each other. Many of these subreddits are about mental health-related issues, such as anxiety, depression, suicide watch, and bipolarity. This type of information is a rich resource for mental health research, as it contains posts written directly by users. With large-scale linguistic analysis, it is possible to detect language characteristics specific to mental health. These can be used to develop tools that are able to classify posts. For instance, when someone announces their intentions of ending their life by suicide or of harming others, such a tool could automatically issue an alert. This study presents initial findings on applying linguistic analysis on mental health-related subreddits, and shows that features such as complexity of sentences, word usage and positive or negative feelings can be informative for further large-scale analysis and tool development. […]