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Detecting and Characterizing Mental Health Related Self-Disclosure in Social Media

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Self-disclosure is an important element facilitating improved psychological wellbeing in individuals with mental illness. As social media is increasingly adopted in health related discourse, we examine how these new platforms might be allowing honest and candid expression of thoughts, experiences and beliefs. Specifically, we seek to detect levels of self-disclosure manifested in posts shared on different mental health forums on Reddit. We develop a classifier for the purpose based on content features. The classifier is able to characterize a Reddit post to be of high, low, or no self-disclosure with 78% accuracy. Applying this classifier to general mental health discourse on Reddit, we find that bulk of such discourse is characterized by high self-disclosure, and that the community responds distinctively to posts that disclose less or more. We conclude with the potential of harnessing our proposed self-disclosure detection algorithm in psychological therapy via social media. We also discuss design considerations for improved community moderation and support in these vulnerable self-disclosing communities.

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  • (2024)“I saw you on TV – here’s my problem”: Exploring participant experiences with second stories following mental health disclosures on Norwegian televisionNordicom Review10.2478/nor-2024-002345:2(277-295)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    2546 pages
    ISBN:9781450331463
    DOI:10.1145/2702613
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Publication History

    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. mental health
    2. reddit
    3. self-disclosure
    4. social media
    5. well-being

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    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI EA '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,520 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)“I saw you on TV – here’s my problem”: Exploring participant experiences with second stories following mental health disclosures on Norwegian televisionNordicom Review10.2478/nor-2024-002345:2(277-295)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Community-Driven Models for Research on Social PlatformsCompanion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3678884.3687141(684-688)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
    • (2024)I Don’t Want to Sound Rude, but It’s None of Their Business: Exploring Security and Privacy Concerns around Assistive Technology Use in Educational SettingsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/367069017:2(1-30)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Investigating the Possibility of Using an AR Mask to Support Online Psychological CounselingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373558:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
    • (2024)CareJournal: A Voice-Based Conversational Agent for Supporting Care CommunicationsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642163(1-22)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)MentaLLaMA: Interpretable Mental Health Analysis on Social Media with Large Language ModelsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3648137(4489-4500)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)A Multimodal Framework for Depression Detection During COVID-19 via Harvesting Social MediaIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2023.330922911:2(2872-2888)Online publication date: Apr-2024
    • (2024)Promoting Stress Management among Students in Higher Education: Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Persuasive Time Management Mobile AppInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.229733041:1(219-241)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Self-Disclosure or Disclosing Personal InformationThe Power of Self-Presentation10.1007/978-3-031-52931-3_2(29-71)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2024
    • (2023)Online health community for change: Analysis of self-disclosure and social networks of users with depressionFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2023.109288414Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
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