2020/04/10 by Ashish Sharma, Sharma, Ashish, Monojit Choudhury +6 · 2 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Digital Mental Health Interventions #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Impact of Technology on Adolescents #Mental Health via Writing #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.04999
openalex publication_date 2020/04/10 · openalex created_date 2022/11/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mental illness is a global health problem, but access to mental healthcare\nresources remain poor worldwide. Online peer-to-peer support platforms attempt\nto alleviate this fundamental gap by enabling those who struggle with mental\nillness to provide and receive social support from their peers. However,\nsuccessful social support requires users to engage with each other and failures\nmay have serious consequences for users in need. Our understanding of\nengagement patterns on mental health platforms is limited but critical to\ninform the role, limitations, and design of these platforms. Here, we present a\nlarge-scale analysis of engagement patterns of 35 million posts on two popular\nonline mental health platforms, TalkLife and Reddit. Leveraging communication\nmodels in human-computer interaction and communication theory, we\noperationalize a set of four engagement indicators based on attention and\ninteraction. We then propose a generative model to jointly model these\nindicators of engagement, the output of which is synthesized into a novel set\nof eleven distinct, interpretable patterns. We demonstrate that this framework\nof engagement patterns enables informative evaluations and analysis of online\nsupport platforms. Specifically, we find that mutual back-and-forth\ninteractions are associated with significantly higher user retention rates on\nTalkLife. Such back-and-forth interactions, in turn, are associated with early\nresponse times and the sentiment of posts.\n