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 “they” pronouns), and self-distancing (fewer “I” 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.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.clpsych-1.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, USA
- Venue:
- CLPsych
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 76–88
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.7
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.clpsych-1.7
- Cite (ACL):
- Molly Ireland, Kaitlin Adams, and Sean Farrell. 2022. Tracking Mental Health Risks and Coping Strategies in Healthcare Workers’ Online Conversations Across the COVID-19 Pandemic. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, pages 76–88, Seattle, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Tracking Mental Health Risks and Coping Strategies in Healthcare Workers’ Online Conversations Across the COVID-19 Pandemic (Ireland et al., CLPsych 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2022.clpsych-1.7.pdf