COVID-19 pandemic has adversely and disproportionately impacted people suffering from mental health issues and substance use problems. This has been exacerbated by social isolation during the pandemic and the social stigma associated with mental health and substance use disorders, making people reluctant to share their struggles and seek help. Due to the anonymity and privacy they provide, social media emerged as a convenient medium for people to share their experiences about their day to day struggles. Reddit is a well-recognized social media platform that provides focused and structured forums called subreddits, that users subscribe to and discuss their experiences with others. Temporal assessment of the topical correlation between social media postings about mental health/substance use and postings about Coronavirus is crucial to better understand public sentiment on the pandemic and its evolving impact, especially related to vulnerable populations. In this study, we conduct a longitudinal topical analysis of postings between subreddits r/depression, r/Anxiety, r/SuicideWatch, and r/Coronavirus, and postings between subreddits r/opiates, r/OpiatesRecovery, r/addiction, and r/Coronavirus from January 2020 - October 2020. Our results show a high topical correlation between postings in r/depression and r/Coronavirus in September 2020. Further, the topical correlation between postings on substance use disorders and Coronavirus fluctuates, showing the highest correlation in August 2020. By monitoring these trends from platforms such as Reddit, epidemiologists, and mental health professionals can gain insights into the challenges faced by communities for targeted interventions.
The complex unfolding of the US opioid epidemic in the last 20 years has been the subject of a large body of medical and pharmacological research, and it has sparked a multidisciplinary discussion on how to implement interventions and policies to effectively control its impact on public health. This study leverages Reddit as the primary data source to investigate the opioid crisis. We aimed to find a large cohort of Reddit users interested in discussing the use of opioids, trace the temporal evolution of their interest, and extensively characterize patterns of the nonmedical consumption of opi…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）；ISTI-CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息科学与技术研究所）
Writing messages is key to expressing feelings. This study adopts cognitive network science to reconstruct how individuals report their feelings in clinical narratives like suicide notes or mental health posts. We achieve this by reconstructing syntactic/semantic associations between conceptsin texts as co-occurrences enriched with affective data. We transform 142 suicide notes and 77,000 Reddit posts from the r/anxiety, r/depression, r/schizophrenia, and r/do-it-your-own (r/DIY) forums into 5 cognitive networks, each one expressing meanings and emotions as reported by authors. These networks …
While non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is not a new phenomenon, there is still a limited yet little is still known about understanding of the behavior, the intent behind the behavior and what the individuals themselves say about their behavior. This study collected pro-NSSI public blog posts from Reddit on pro-NSSI and analyzed the content linguistically using LIWC software, in order to examine the use of NSSI specific words, linguistic properties and the psychological linguistic properties. were examined. The results inform current counseling practices by dispelling myths and providing insight…
Institute for Clarity in Documentation（文档清晰化研究所）；Inria Paris-Rocquencourt（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎-罗克库尔中心）；Rajiv Gandhi University（拉吉夫·甘地大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Palmer Research Laboratories（帕尔默研究实验室）
COVID-19 poses disproportionate mental health consequences to the public during different phases of the pandemic. We use a computational approach to capture the specific aspects that trigger an online community's anxiety about the pandemic and investigate how these aspects change over time. First, we identified nine subjects of anxiety (SOAs) in a sample of Reddit posts ($N$=86) from r/COVID19\_support using thematic analysis. Then, we quantified Reddit users' anxiety by training algorithms on a manually annotated sample ($N$=793) to automatically label the SOAs in a larger chronological sampl…
Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）
Given the current social distance restrictions across the world, most individuals now use social media as their major medium of communication. Millions of people suffering from mental diseases have been isolated due to this, and they are unable to get help in person. They have become more reliant on online venues to express themselves and seek advice on dealing with their mental disorders. According to the World health organization (WHO), approximately 450 million people are affected. Mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, etc., are immensely common and have affected an individuals' ph…
Platforms like Reddit and Twitter offer internet users an opportunity to talk about diverse issues, including those pertaining to physical and mental health. Some of these forums also function as a safe space for severely distressed mental health patients to get social support from peers. The online community platform Reddit's SuicideWatch is one example of an online forum dedicated specifically to people who suffer from suicidal thoughts, or who are concerned about people who might be at risk. It remains to be seen if these forums can be used to understand and model the nature of online socia…
Breaking the Cycle of Incarceration With Targeted Mental Health Outreach: A Case Study in Machine Learning for Public Policy
Machine Learning Department（机器学习部门）；Heinz College of Public Policy（公共政策学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Center for Data Science and Public Policy（数据科学与公共政策中心）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Thousand Voices of Trauma: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Modeling Prolonged Exposure Therapy Conversations
College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学信息科学与技术学院）；Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University（埃默里大学精神病学与行为科学系）；School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院交互计算学院）；School of Psychology, Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院心理学学院）
A Thematic Framework for Analyzing Large-scale Self-reported Social Media Data on Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Using Buprenorphine Product
Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Geisel School of Medicine（盖泽尔医学院）；Dartmouth Health（达特茅斯医疗中心）；Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center（达特茅斯-希契科克医疗中心）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）；Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁医学院）；Yale University School of Public Health（耶鲁大学公共卫生学院）；Columbia University Irving Medical Center（哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心）；New York State Psychiatric Institute（纽约州精神病学研究所）
