An Exploratory Analysis of the Relation Between Offensive Language and Mental Health

TL;DR

This study investigates the relationship between offensive language use on social media and mental health, revealing higher offensive language frequency among individuals with depression or signs of depression.

Contribution

It introduces a computational analysis comparing offensive language in social media posts of depressed and non-depressed groups, linking offensive language to mental health indicators.

Findings

Offensive language is more common in posts by individuals with depression.

Individuals showing signs of depression also use more offensive language.

The study opens new research directions in mental health and online communication.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the interplay between the use of offensive language and mental health. We acquired publicly available datasets created for offensive language identification and depression detection and we train computational models to compare the use of offensive language in social media posts written by groups of individuals with and without self-reported depression diagnosis. We also look at samples written by groups of individuals whose posts show signs of depression according to recent related studies. Our analysis indicates that offensive language is more frequently used in the samples written by individuals with self-reported depression as well as individuals showing signs of depression. The results discussed here open new avenues in research in politeness/offensiveness and mental health.