Tracking Mental Health Risks and Coping Strategies in Healthcare Workers’ Online Conversations Across the COVID-19 Pandemic

Molly Ireland, Kaitlin Adams, Sean Farrell


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
Editors:
Ayah Zirikly, Dana Atzil-Slonim, Maria Liakata, Steven Bedrick, Bart Desmet, Molly Ireland, Andrew Lee, Sean MacAvaney, Matthew Purver, Rebecca Resnik, Andrew Yates
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
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.7.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.7.mp4