Understanding who uses Reddit: Profiling individuals with a self-reported bipolar disorder diagnosis

TL;DR

This study uses NLP techniques to profile nearly 20,000 Reddit users with self-reported bipolar disorder, revealing demographic and clinical characteristics and discussing ethical considerations.

Contribution

It demonstrates how NLP can extract detailed user characteristics from online health data, enhancing understanding of mental health populations on social media.

Findings

Majority are young or middle-aged US-based adults

Slightly more feminine than masculine gender distribution

Many report additional mental health diagnoses

Abstract

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.