Privacy Discourse and Emotional Dynamics in Mental Health Information Interaction on Reddit

TL;DR

This study analyzes privacy-related discussions and emotional dynamics in mental health communities on Reddit, revealing increased privacy discourse and its correlation with user sentiment over time.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of privacy discourse and emotional alignment across multiple mental health subreddits using sentiment and keyword analysis.

Findings

High emotional similarity between related mental health communities.

50% increase in privacy discussions from 2020 to 2025.

Significant differences in privacy discourse across subreddit domains.

Abstract

Reddit is a major venue for mental-health information interaction and peer support, where privacy concerns increasingly surface in user discourse. Thus, we analyze privacy-related discussions across 14 mental-health and regulatory subreddits, comprising 10,119 posts and 65,385 comments collected with a custom web scraper. Using lexicon-based sentiment analysis, we quantify emotional alignment between communities via cosine similarity of sentiment distributions, observing high similarity for Bipolar and ADHD (0.877), Anxiety and Depression (0.849), and MentalHealthSupport and MentalIllness (0.989) subreddits. We also construct keyword dictionaries to tag privacy-related themes (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR) and perform temporal analysis from 2020 to 2025, finding a 50% increase in privacy discourse with intermittent regulatory spikes. A chi-square test of independence across subreddit domains indicates significant distributional differences. The results characterize how privacy-oriented discussion co-varies with user sentiment in online mental-health communities.