Exploring Self-Identified Counseling Expertise in Online Support Forums

TL;DR

This study analyzes how self-identified mental health professionals and peers differ in their online support responses, using classification and linguistic analysis to understand engagement and interaction styles in health forums.

Contribution

It introduces a classifier to distinguish between professional and peer responses and analyzes linguistic and engagement differences in online mental health support.

Findings

A classifier effectively differentiates between professional and peer responses.

Linguistic styles and engagement patterns vary significantly between the two groups.

Understanding these differences can improve online mental health support strategies.

Abstract

A growing number of people engage in online health forums, making it important to understand the quality of the advice they receive. In this paper, we explore the role of expertise in responses provided to help-seeking posts regarding mental health. We study the differences between (1) interactions with peers; and (2) interactions with self-identified mental health professionals. First, we show that a classifier can distinguish between these two groups, indicating that their language use does in fact differ. To understand this difference, we perform several analyses addressing engagement aspects, including whether their comments engage the support-seeker further as well as linguistic aspects, such as dominant language and linguistic style matching. Our work contributes toward the developing efforts of understanding how health experts engage with health information- and support-seekers in social networks. More broadly, it is a step toward a deeper understanding of the styles of interactions that cultivate supportive engagement in online communities.