Community Trends in Online Mental Health Forum

We analyze the patterns in mental discourse of the student community on Reddit. We define the student-mental-health Reddit community as users posting in both college-related and mental-health-related subreddits at nearly the same time, and determine how the topics they discuss evolve in time and affect future discourse. We achieve this by conducting a two-stage analysis comprised of (1) traditional and deep topic modeling approaches that automatically extract the topics discussed by such users in our data and (2) time series modeling and analysis that quantifies and exploits the temporal relationships between these topics. Based on three separate topic modeling approaches, we find that students frequently express concerns related to course workloads, managing their mental health conditions, ADHD, deciding their program of study, friendships, and romantic relationships. We also find that many of these topics are interrelated, most being dependent on scheduling time for a school year and one’s progress through their academic program.