Understanding Postpartum Parents' Experiences via Two Digital Platforms

TL;DR

This study analyzes postpartum support seekers' experiences on digital platforms, revealing key differences between distressed and healthy mothers and highlighting how platform design influences support-seeking behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of postpartum mothers' concerns and mental health states across two digital platforms using innovative analytical methods.

Findings

Distressed mothers report interpersonal issues and severe symptoms, including suicidal ideation.

Healthy mothers mainly discuss childcare topics with no severe mental health concerns.

Platform design influences the speech patterns and affect of distressed mothers.

Abstract

Digital platforms, including online forums and helplines, have emerged as avenues of support for caregivers suffering from postpartum mental health distress. Understanding support seekers' experiences as shared on these platforms could provide crucial insight into caregivers' needs during this vulnerable time. In the current work, we provide a descriptive analysis of the concerns, psychological states, and motivations shared by healthy and distressed postpartum support seekers on two digital platforms, a one-on-one digital helpline and a publicly available online forum. Using a combination of human annotations, dictionary models and unsupervised techniques, we find stark differences between the experiences of distressed and healthy mothers. Distressed mothers described interpersonal problems and a lack of support, with 8.60% - 14.56% reporting severe symptoms including suicidal ideation. In contrast, the majority of healthy mothers described childcare issues, such as questions about breastfeeding or sleeping, and reported no severe mental health concerns. Across the two digital platforms, we found that distressed mothers shared similar content. However, the patterns of speech and affect shared by distressed mothers differed between the helpline vs. the online forum, suggesting the design of these platforms may shape meaningful measures of their support-seeking experiences. Our results provide new insight into the experiences of caregivers suffering from postpartum mental health distress. We conclude by discussing methodological considerations for understanding content shared by support seekers and design considerations for the next generation of support tools for postpartum parents.