Quantifying the Effects of COVID-19 on Mental Health Support Forums
Laura Biester, Katie Matton, Janarthanan Rajendran, Emily Mower Provost, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, like many of the disease outbreaks that have preceded it, is likely to have a profound effect on mental health. Understanding its impact can inform strategies for mitigating negative consequences. In this work, we seek to better understand the effects of COVID-19 on mental health by examining discussions within mental health support communities on Reddit. First, we quantify the rate at which COVID-19 is discussed in each community, or subreddit, in order to understand levels of pandemic-related discussion. Next, we examine the volume of activity in order to determine whether the number of people discussing mental health has risen. Finally, we analyze how COVID-19 has influenced language use and topics of discussion within each subreddit.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.nlpcovid19-2.8
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Karin Verspoor, Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Michael Conway, Berry de Bruijn, Mark Dredze, Rada Mihalcea, Byron Wallace
- Venue:
- NLP-COVID19
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-2.8
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.nlpcovid19-2.8
- Cite (ACL):
- Laura Biester, Katie Matton, Janarthanan Rajendran, Emily Mower Provost, and Rada Mihalcea. 2020. Quantifying the Effects of COVID-19 on Mental Health Support Forums. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Quantifying the Effects of COVID-19 on Mental Health Support Forums (Biester et al., NLP-COVID19 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2020.nlpcovid19-2.8.pdf