This project emphasizes the importance of mental health and how understanding the community's discussions and perceptions can help provide support to those in need. The data was collected for almost two years from the largest mental health-centered communities on Reddit, starting in late 2018. The article aims to explore the changes in mental health and addiction discussions on the platform between 2018 and 2020 using the collected data.
The article discusses a dataset created with the National Institutes of Health to better understand how online mental health support groups were used during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a coping mechanism. According to the World Health Organization, there was an increase in anxiety, depression, and related disorders during the lockdown period of the pandemic. This mental health crisis was compounded by a "gap in care" due to spiking healthcare costs, impacted medical facilities, and isolation caused by lockdowns. Consequently, many people sought help and community online as a substitute for face-to-face treatment, particularly younger populations with less access to traditional healthcare.
Given the wealth of data from the Reddit Mental Health data set, we hope to analyse the use of the Reddit Platform as tool for connecting those with both mental health disorders and substance use disorders over the years leading up to and immediately proceeding the early 2020 lock downs. We hope to explore the following questions:
- How did economic stress change over the Pandemic, and did is it related to changes within emotion (i.e. Anger, Anxiety, General Negative Emotion).
- Do changes within substance use disorder communities mirror trends within mental health communities?
- Do different mental health/emotional states affect the number of words written in a post?
The original data in this analysis is from Reddit and comprises 107 different datasets, including posts from 15 mental health support groups across 28 subreddits from 2018 to 2020. It was originally used, from January to April 2020, to analyze how COVID-19 affected mental health support groups1. The dataset was downloaded from Open Science Framework (OSF)2, a free and open-source project management tool for researchers.