Mental Health Discourse on reddit: Self-Disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity
Open accessAbstract
Social media is continually emerging as a platform of information exchange around health challenges. We study mental health discourse on the popular social media:reddit. Building on findings about health information seeking and sharing practices in online forums, and social media like Twitter, we address three research challenges. First, we present a characterization of self-disclosure inmental illness communities on reddit. We observe individuals discussing a variety of concerns ranging from the daily grind to specific queries about diagnosis and treatment. Second, we build a statistical model to examine the factors that drive social support on mental health reddit communities. We also develop language models to characterize mental health social support, which are observed to bear emotional, informational, instrumental, and prescriptive information. Finally, we study disinhibition in the light of the dissociative anonymity that reddit’s throwaway accounts provide. Apart from promoting open conversations,such anonymity surprisingly is found to gather feedback that is more involving and emotionally engaging. Our findings reveal, for the first time, the kind of unique information needs that a social media like reddit might be fulfilling when it comes to a stigmatic illness. They also expand our understanding of the role of the social web in behavioral therapy.
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Prior work on mental health discourse on the web found that anonymity does not hinder the social support that people receive on their posts, which can facilitate open conversations, and that social media may be particularly useful for stigmatic illnesses such as mental health.
“Similarly, prior work on mental health discourse on the web found that anonymity does not hinder the social support that people receive on their posts, which can facilitate open conversations, and that social media may be particularly useful for stigmatic illnesses such as mental health [252].”
From Barriers to and facilitators of user engagement with digital mental health interventions: Systematic review (2021) · cites this paper as [252]
With the wide adoption of web and social media technologies, support seeking and providing is increasingly happening online and has been shown to be efficacious.
“With the wide adoption of web and social media technologies, support seeking (and providing) is increasingly happening online and has been shown to be efficacious [21,59].”
From Psychosocial Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Large-scale Quasi-Experimental Study on Social Media (2020) · cites this paper as [59]
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- Authors
- De Choudhury, M., & De, S.
- Affiliations
- Arizona State University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
- Published
- 2014-05-16
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 71-80
- ISSN
- 2162-3449 (ISSN-L)
- 2334-0770
- OpenAlex
- W2182854643
- Cited by
- 836
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 91 · 2025: 107 · 2024: 92 · 2023: 101 · 2022: 84 · 2021: 136 · 2020: 77 · 2019: 54 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 32 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 35.33
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (publishedVersion)
- AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Literacy and Information Accessibility
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Expert finding and Q&A systems
- Keywords
- mental health discourse, Reddit, self-disclosure, social support, anonymity, disinhibition, stigma, health information seeking, online forums, language models, emotional engagement, behavior therapy
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