Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Feb 23, 2023
Date Accepted: Sep 13, 2023
How people with a bipolar disorder diagnosis talk about personal recovery in peer online support forums: corpus framework analysis using POETIC
ABSTRACT
Background:
Personal recovery is of particular value in bipolar disorder where symptoms often persist despite treatment. The authors previously defined a POETIC (Purpose and meaning, Optimism and hope, Empowerment, Tensions, Identity, Connectedness) framework for personal recovery in bipolar disorder. So far, personal recovery has only been studied in researcher-constructed environments (interviews, focus groups). Support forum posts can serve as a complementary non-reactive data resource to understand the lived experience of personal recovery.
Objective:
This study aimed to answer the question “What can online support forum posts reveal about the processes and experience of personal recovery in bipolar disorder in relation to the POETIC framework?”.
Methods:
By integrating natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and health research methods, this study analysed public bipolar disorder support forum posts relevant to the lived experience of personal recovery. Comparing 4.5K personal recovery-relevant posts by 2K users to 25K non-personal recovery-relevant posts identified 130 significantly overused key lemmas. Key lemmas were manually coded according to the POETIC framework.
Results:
PR-related discussions primarily focussed on three domains: Purpose and meaning (particularly reproductive decisions, work), Connectedness (romantic relationships, social support), Empowerment (self-management, personal responsibility). The study confirmed the validity of the POETIC framework to capture personal recovery experiences shared online and highlighted new aspects beyond previous studies using interviews and focus groups.
Conclusions:
This study is the first to analyse non-reactive data on personal recovery in bipolar disorder. Indicating the key areas that people focus on in personal recovery when posting freely and the language they use, provides helpful starting points for formal and informal carers to understand the concerns of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder and to consider how best to offer support.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.