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Observational Study
. 2023 Jun;32(6):975-985.
doi: 10.1007/s00787-022-02067-7. Epub 2022 Aug 26.

Psycholinguistic changes in the communication of adolescent users in a suicidal ideation online community during the COVID-19 pandemic

Johannes Feldhege  1 , Markus Wolf  2 , Markus Moessner  3 , Stephanie Bauer  3
Affiliations
Observational Study

Psycholinguistic changes in the communication of adolescent users in a suicidal ideation online community during the COVID-19 pandemic

Johannes Feldhege et al. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2023 Jun.

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, increases in suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in adolescents have been registered. Many adolescents experiencing suicidal ideation turn to online communities for social support. In this retrospective observational study, we investigated the communication-language style, contents and user activity-in 7975 unique posts and 51,119 comments by N = 2862 active adolescent users in a large suicidal ideation support community (SISC) on the social media website reddit.com in the onset period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found significant relative changes in language style markers for hopelessness such as negative emotion words (+ 10.00%) and positive emotion words (- 3.45%) as well as for social disengagement such as social references (- 8.63%) and 2nd person pronouns (- 33.97%) since the outbreak of the pandemic. Using topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identified significant changes in content for the topics Hopelessness (+ 23.98%), Suicide Methods (+ 17.11%), Social Support (- 14.91%), and Reaching Out to users (- 28.97%). Changes in user activity point to an increased expression of mental health issues and decreased engagement with other users. The results indicate a potential shift in communication patterns with more adolescent users expressing their suicidal ideation rather than relating with or supporting other users during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: Adolescents; Language style; Online self-help community; Social media; Suicidal ideation; Suicide attempt; Topic modelling.

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Conflict of interest statement

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Relative change of medians of linguistic markers for social disengagement and hopelessness in adolescent users’ posts and comments in a suicidal ideation self-help community on the social media website Reddit between the pre- and mid-pandemic time
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Relative change of medians of topic prevalence in adolescent users’ posts and comments in a suicidal ideation self-help community on the social media website Reddit between the pre- and mid-pandemic time periods
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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