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
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-2.8.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939847