Exploring Profiles of Cognitive Distortions Associated with Mental Health Disorders
For computational mental health researchers, this work provides an exploratory analysis of cognitive distortions across multiple disorders, but the findings are incremental and based on group-level trends.
The study analyzed cognitive distortions across nine mental health conditions using Reddit data, finding higher distortion prevalence in all conditions compared to controls, with small to moderate effect sizes and largely similar profiles across conditions.
Cognitive distortions, distorted patterns of thinking, have been increasingly studied in computational mental health research. Although they are related to many, if not all, mental health disorders, most existing studies focus primarily on depression. In this work, we explore distortion profiles across multiple mental health conditions. We analyzed a large Reddit-based dataset containing posts from nine self-reported mental health groups as well as a control group using both an n-gram-based method and a fine-tuned transformer model for detecting cognitive distortions. Mental health groups, both when pooled together and when examined individually, showed higher prevalence of cognitive distortions compared to the control group, with the effect sizes ranging from small to moderate. When comparing distortion profiles across conditions, we observed largely similar patterns, although some groups exhibited overall higher levels of distortions than others. These findings suggest that relatively simple lexical approaches can be useful for exploratory analyses of group-level trends in large-scale mental health text data.