JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on individuals’ mental health and well-being worldwide. The sudden changes in daily life, such as social isolation, loss of employment, and fear of illness, have led to increased stress and anxiety. Moreover, the pandemic has also highlighted the existing mental health disparities within communities. Social media platforms, such as Reddit, have become an important source of information and support for many individuals during the pandemic.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on mental health and well-being through a user discourse analysis of Reddit. By analyzing the posts on the platform utilizing natural language processing and machine learning techniques, this study seeks to (a) understand the diverse effects of the pandemic of the pandemic on individuals’ mental health and well-being and (b) recognize any discrepancies in the mental health impacts of COVID-19 within the r/Depression and r/Anxiety subreddits.

Methods:

The research involved collecting 18 mental health subreddits, including 3 million posts from 2019 to 2021. The posts were filtered to focus on two mental health subreddits, r/Depression and r/Anxiety, which contained specific lexicon associated with the impact of COVID-19. An unsupervised machine learning algorithm, K-means clustering, was applied to uncover hidden theme trends of two Subreddits' posts before, during, and after the pandemic. To pre-train the two subreddits’ corpora, we utilized a BERT masked language model and manually selected certain sentences with one masked word each to explore impacts of COVID-19.

Results:

The study revealed an increase in the number of posts in the r/Anxiety and r/Depression Subreddits, with an uptrend in r/Anxiety and a downtrend in r/Depression at the beginning of 2020. This pattern was supported by Twitter data, which showed a similar trend. The studies identified six key factors that were impacting individuals’ mental health during the pandemic: economic stress, social isolation, domestic stress, school lockdown, substance use, and suicide. Economic stress had the highest representation in posts, averaging at 30% in both Subreddits, with substance use following closely. A BERT analysis also showed that individuals in the r/Depression subreddit more frequently used positive words in relation to these impact factors, compared to those in the r/Anxiety subreddit.

Conclusions:

This study found an increase trend in posts on mental health issues during the pandemic, with economic stress identified as the most prevalent factor impacting individuals. BERT analysis revealed differences in language use between the r/Depression and r/Anxiety subreddits. These findings provide valuable insights into the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fundamental factors that contribute to people’s mental health. In the future, it may allow people to prevent mental health issues.