Understanding who uses Reddit: Profiling individuals with a self-reported bipolar disorder diagnosis
This work addresses the problem of generalizability in mental health studies for researchers by providing detailed user profiles, though it is incremental as it uses existing methods on new data.
The paper tackled the lack of user characteristics in mental health research using Reddit data by applying existing NLP methods to profile nearly 20,000 users who self-report a bipolar disorder diagnosis, revealing a population that is slightly more feminine-gendered, young or middle-aged, US-based, and often with additional mental health diagnoses.
Recently, research on mental health conditions using public online data, including Reddit, has surged in NLP and health research but has not reported user characteristics, which are important to judge generalisability of findings. This paper shows how existing NLP methods can yield information on clinical, demographic, and identity characteristics of almost 20K Reddit users who self-report a bipolar disorder diagnosis. This population consists of slightly more feminine- than masculine-gendered mainly young or middle-aged US-based adults who often report additional mental health diagnoses, which is compared with general Reddit statistics and epidemiological studies. Additionally, this paper carefully evaluates all methods and discusses ethical issues.