Paper Info
Title
The language of mental health problems in social media.
Abstract
Online social media, such as Reddit, has become an important resource to share personal experiences and communicate with others. Among other personal information, some social media users communicate about mental health problems they are experiencing, with the intention of getting advice, support or empathy from other users. Here, we investigate the language of Reddit posts specific to mental health, to define linguistic characteristics that could be helpful for further applications. The latter include attempting to identify posts that need urgent attention due to their nature, e.g. when someone announces their intentions of ending their life by suicide or harming others. Our results show that there are a variety of linguistic features that are discriminative across mental health user communities and that can be further exploited in subsequent classification tasks. Furthermore, while negative sentiment is almost uniformly expressed across the entire data set, we demonstrate that there are also condition-specific vocabularies used in social media to communicate about particular disorders. Source code and related materials are available from: https: //github.com/gkotsis/ reddit-mental-health.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
CLPsych@HLT-NAACL
Empathy,Internet privacy,Personal experience,Social media,Source code,Computer science,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Personally identifiable information,Mental health,Discriminative model
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
6
0.49
References 
Authors
12
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
George Gkotsis1649.84
Anika Oellrich215713.61
Tim J. P. Hubbard3316.95
Richard Dobson4189.86
Maria Liakata537530.40
Sumithra Velupillai624230.04
Rina Dutta7183.67