Mental Health Self-Disclosure on Social Media throughout the Pandemic Period

TL;DR

This study analyzes mental health self-disclosure on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing how pandemic-related events influence emotional expression and demonstrating that mental health features can improve emotion prediction accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a soft labeling technique for mental health detection in social media comments and links emotional disclosures to pandemic events, enhancing emotion prediction methods.

Findings

Pandemic events correlate with increased mental health disclosures.

Mental health features improve emotion prediction accuracy.

Self-disclosure patterns vary with COVID-19 policy dates.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created many problems, especially in people's social lives. There has been increasing isolation and economic hardships since the beginning of the pandemic for people all over the world. Quarantines and lockdowns also took part in that, and so, people have been expressing their emotions throughout the pandemic period using social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. In this study, we seek to analyze the emotions and mental health labels throughout the time period of March 2, 2020, up until July 4, 2020, from the threads and comments gathered from the r/unitedkingdom subreddit. We used a soft labeling technique to generate mental health conditions for each Reddit comment. We compared the overall results with important dates related to COVID-19 policies that took place in the United Kingdom. This can give us a view on how the pandemic and the important dates affect people self disclosing their emotions on social media platforms. Finally, we have developed a proof of concept to show that using mental health features may increase emotion prediction accuracy.