Understanding How Discourse Themes In An Online Mental Health Communit

1Department of Informatics, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland 2Management Information Systems Group, Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland 3Institute of Business Information Technology, Department of General Management, School of Management and Law, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Zurich, Switzerland Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics Background: Social media, encompassing online mental health communities (OMHCs), has revolutionized mental health discourse by fostering open discussions that drive population-specific empowerment. These discussions generate diverse empowerment processes, such as informational, family awareness, and social awareness support, that can empower different health-consumer populations based on their support needs.

However, how OMHC discourse themes drive these empowerment processes remains unexplored. The global burden of mental health disorders has increased steadily during the past decade. Today, mental illness is the leading cause of total years lived with disability. At the same time, global mental health policies and budgets fall short of addressing the societal burden as mental health discourse languishes in the shadows due to stigma. As social media have become an increasingly popular source of information, they create opportunities as well as threats for mental health discourse. On the one hand, social media can help to bring awareness to stigmatized topics as they give marginalized members of society the possibility to share experiences and voice their discontent.

On the other hand, mental health discourse on social media may lead to stigmatization. To date, little is known about social media mental health discourse and what drives it. This study addresses these research gaps by (1) mapping the mental health discourse on Twitter and (2) analyzing mechanisms of cultural power through which some mental health topics take prevalence over the others. Drawing on Twitter data, this research employs innovative methods of topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and panel data regression analyses. Theoretically, it combines, in a multidisciplinary fashion, concepts such as emotional energy and cognitive focus from sociology and bandwagon behavior from economics. Our findings show that low-cost attention mechanisms are ineffective in fostering online mental health discourse, whereas emotional energy and discursive variability have a positive influence by engaging audiences, creating online solidarity, and speaking to...

Social media mental health discourse is also shown to be quite diverse and more stigma-neutral than such discourse in traditional media. Keywords: Cognitive-emotional currents; Cultural power; Discourse analysis; Emotional energy; Mental health; Social media; Stigma; Topic modeling. Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved. Our research integrity and auditing teams lead the rigorous process that protects the quality of the scientific record

Our paper investigates the use of discourse embedding techniques to develop a community recommendation system that focuses on mental health support groups on social media. Social media platforms provide a means for users to anonymously connect with communities that cater to their specific interests. However, with the vast number of online communities available, users may face difficulties in identifying relevant groups to address their mental health concerns. To address this challenge, we explore the integration of discourse information from various subreddit communities using embedding techniques to develop an effective recommendation system. Our approach involves the use of content-based and collaborative filtering techniques to enhance the performance of the recommendation system. Our findings indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the use of each technique separately and provides interpretability in the recommendation process.

The rise of social media as a platform has allowed people all over the world to connect and communicate with one another. Further, these communities that exist online are able to keep their members anonymous from one another, allowing new communities to form which would have a hard time existing without anonymity. Specifically, this new and robust anonymity has allowed an explosion of online communities with a focus on giving each other advice on health issues. While being involved in seeking peer support in a community with people that have experienced similar issues can provide a significant positive impact on someone’s ability to navigate their personal problems Richard et al. (2022), finding communities with relevant discourse is not trivial. Often, the platforms which host these communities have a very large quantity of them.

There are over 100,000 different communities on Reddit alone. Further, some communities are not easily found due to their inherently anonymous nature, so the only way a user can decide if they fit within the community is by spending time reading through the... For these reasons, new users seeking others who have experienced similar situations may have a very hard time finding communities that would help them the most, even if they are familiar with the platform... Recently, embedding long sequences of text has received lots of interest both from the research community and from practitioners. A number of studies have shown embeddings can be useful for measuring the similarity both between document pairs and between question-document pairs Karpukhin et al. (2020); Xiong et al.

(2020); Qu et al. (2021), allowing for retrieval of the most similar documents given a new question or document. However, little work has been done investigating how the discourse within a community, which represents the meaning of that community, can be represented in a single embedding. The discourse of a community in this context can be all users’ posts in that specific community or represented community’s description. This poses a unique challenge as discourse within these communities is often in the form of threads that, unlike documents, are not naturally represented as a single block of text. Edited and Reviewed by: Heleen Riper, VU Amsterdam, Netherlands

Correspondence: Ang Li angli@bjfu.edu.cn Received 2023 Apr 18; Accepted 2023 May 3; Collection date 2023. Keywords: digital mental health, technology innovation, health technology implementation, barrier, solution This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted... No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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