@inproceedings{ireland-etal-2022-tracking,
    title = "Tracking Mental Health Risks and Coping Strategies in Healthcare Workers' Online Conversations Across the {COVID}-19 Pandemic",
    author = "Ireland, Molly  and
      Adams, Kaitlin  and
      Farrell, Sean",
    editor = "Zirikly, Ayah  and
      Atzil-Slonim, Dana  and
      Liakata, Maria  and
      Bedrick, Steven  and
      Desmet, Bart  and
      Ireland, Molly  and
      Lee, Andrew  and
      MacAvaney, Sean  and
      Purver, Matthew  and
      Resnik, Rebecca  and
      Yates, Andrew",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2022.clpsych-1.7/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.clpsych-1.7",
    pages = "76--88",
    abstract = "The mental health risks of the COVID-19 pandemic are magnified for medical professionals, such as doctors and nurses. To track conversational markers of psychological distress and coping strategies, we analyzed 67.25 million words written by self-identified healthcare workers (N = 5,409; 60.5{\%} nurses, 40.5{\%} physicians) on Reddit beginning in June 2019. Dictionary-based measures revealed increasing emotionality (including more positive and negative emotion and more swearing), social withdrawal (less affiliation and empathy, more {\textquotedblleft}they{\textquotedblright} pronouns), and self-distancing (fewer {\textquotedblleft}I{\textquotedblright} pronouns) over time. Several effects were strongest for conversations that were least health-focused and self-relevant, suggesting that long-term changes in social and emotional behavior are general and not limited to personal or work-related experiences. Understanding protective and risky coping strategies used by healthcare workers during the pandemic is fundamental for maintaining mental health among front-line workers during periods of chronic stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic."
}