Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Mar 23, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 22, 2021 - May 17, 2021
Date Accepted: Jul 15, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Natural Language Processing Insights into LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis of r/LGBTeens Microcommunity Reveals Increased Anxiety in Topics and Trends
ABSTRACT
Background:
Widespread fear surrounding COVID-19, coupled with the extreme physical and social distancing orders, has caused severe negative mental health outcomes. Yet little is known about how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting LGBTQ+ youth, who experienced disproportionately high adverse mental health outcomes prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to address this knowledge gap.
Objective:
This work aims to harness natural language processing (NLP) methodologies to investigate the evolution of conversation topics in the most popular subreddit for LGBTQ+ youth.
Methods:
We generated a dataset of all r/LGBTeens subreddit posts made between Jan 1, 2020 to Feb 1, 2021. We analyzed meaningful trends in anxiety, anger, and sadness in posts. Since the distribution of anxiety before widespread social distancing orders was meaningfully different from the distribution after (P < .001), we employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to examine topics provoking this shift in anxiety.
Results:
While the present study did not find differences in LGBTQ+ youth anger and sadness, results revealed that anxiety increased significantly during social distancing measures compared to before lockdown (P < .001). Further analysis revealed a list of 10 anxiety-provoking topics discussed during the pandemic: attraction to a friend, coming out, coming out to family, discrimination, education, exploring sexuality, gender pronouns, love/relationship advice, starting a new relationship, and struggling with mental health.
Conclusions:
Conversation topics related to coming-out, gender and sexual identities, discrimination, and relationships were anxiety provoking for LGBTQ+ youth, both before and after the pandemic. The frequency of these conversations increased with lifestyle disruptors related to the pandemic, reflecting LGBTQ+ teens' increased reliance on anonymous discussion forums as safe spaces for discussing lifestyle stressors during COVID-19 lifestyle disruptions (e.g., school closures).
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.