Detecting and Characterizing Trends in Online Mental Health Discussions

Mental illness is a widespread public health concern that affects many individuals on a daily basis. Increasingly, people are turning to social media to discuss their mental health. The result is a rich dataset of authentic discussions from which to draw insights. In this work, we collected data from multiple mental health forums on the popular social media website, Reddit. We extracted topics from these datasets and then observed the trends of these topics from 2012 to 2018. These trends fall into many recognizable patterns. Some trends are stable, often using common words found in mental health conversations. Other trends are increasing or decreasing. In this work, we found that topics with positive words are becoming less frequently used and topics with negative connotations are becoming more frequently used. Other trends display a periodic pattern, like those associated with the school year. One trend demonstrates a sudden shift in conversation possibly due to a change in how the site is administered. We confirm these qualitative observations through quantitative analysis with statistical tests.