TY - GEN
T1 - Mental Health Discussion
T2 - 11th International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, CSCI 2024
AU - Tomasello, Joseph
AU - Kwak, Daehan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable shift in the way mental health is perceived, moving away from the stigma that once silenced discussions around it. Nowadays, conversations about mental well-being are widespread, especially online, where various platforms have dedicated spaces for users to share their thoughts, advice, and personal experiences. Notably, Reddit.com stands out as a hub for such discussions, hosting numerous communities, or ‘subreddits,’ focused on mental health topics. Among the most popular are r/mentalhealth, r/depression, and r/anxiety, which collectively boast more than 1.8 million subscribers. This project aimed to gather and analyze textual data from these three subreddits, spanning four years from March 11, 2018, to March 11, 2022. Employing natural language processing techniques, the dataset, consisting of approximately 1.1 million posts, was dissected by means of sentiment analysis and topic modeling. By examining trends across all three subreddits, as well as individually, the study sought to understand how mental health discussions evolve within Reddit’s user community and what topics stand out as the most prevalent. This involved delving into the body text of posts made to the site and referencing Reddit’s tagging system to categorize discussions within each community, where available.
AB - Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable shift in the way mental health is perceived, moving away from the stigma that once silenced discussions around it. Nowadays, conversations about mental well-being are widespread, especially online, where various platforms have dedicated spaces for users to share their thoughts, advice, and personal experiences. Notably, Reddit.com stands out as a hub for such discussions, hosting numerous communities, or ‘subreddits,’ focused on mental health topics. Among the most popular are r/mentalhealth, r/depression, and r/anxiety, which collectively boast more than 1.8 million subscribers. This project aimed to gather and analyze textual data from these three subreddits, spanning four years from March 11, 2018, to March 11, 2022. Employing natural language processing techniques, the dataset, consisting of approximately 1.1 million posts, was dissected by means of sentiment analysis and topic modeling. By examining trends across all three subreddits, as well as individually, the study sought to understand how mental health discussions evolve within Reddit’s user community and what topics stand out as the most prevalent. This involved delving into the body text of posts made to the site and referencing Reddit’s tagging system to categorize discussions within each community, where available.
KW - Mental Health
KW - Sentiment Analysis
KW - Social Media Platform
KW - Textual Data Analysis
KW - Topic Modeling
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105013618864
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-95127-5_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-95127-5_7
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105013618864
SN - 9783031951268
T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science
SP - 90
EP - 102
BT - Computational Science and Computational Intelligence - 11th International Conference, CSCI 2024, Proceedings
A2 - Arabnia, Hamid R.
A2 - Deligiannidis, Leonidas
A2 - Shenavarmasouleh, Farzan
A2 - Amirian, Soheyla
A2 - Ghareh Mohammadi, Farid
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 11 December 2024 through 13 December 2024
ER -