Understanding who uses Reddit: Profiling individuals with a self-reported bipolar disorder diagnosis

Glorianna Jagfeld, Fiona Lobban, Paul Rayson, Steven Jones


Abstract
Recently, research on mental health conditions using public online data, including Reddit, has surged in NLP and health research but has not reported user characteristics, which are important to judge generalisability of findings. This paper shows how existing NLP methods can yield information on clinical, demographic, and identity characteristics of almost 20K Reddit users who self-report a bipolar disorder diagnosis. This population consists of slightly more feminine- than masculine-gendered mainly young or middle-aged US-based adults who often report additional mental health diagnoses, which is compared with general Reddit statistics and epidemiological studies. Additionally, this paper carefully evaluates all methods and discusses ethical issues.
Anthology ID:
2021.clpsych-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–14
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.clpsych-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.clpsych-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Glorianna Jagfeld, Fiona Lobban, Paul Rayson, and Steven Jones. 2021. Understanding who uses Reddit: Profiling individuals with a self-reported bipolar disorder diagnosis. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access, pages 1–14, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding who uses Reddit: Profiling individuals with a self-reported bipolar disorder diagnosis (Jagfeld et al., CLPsych 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.clpsych-1.1.pdf
Code
 glorisonne/reddit_bd_user_characteristics
Data
SMHD