Search

Online peer support mental health forums provide an effective and accessible form of support, augmenting scarce clinical and face-to-face assistance. However, to enhance their effectiveness, it is essential to understand the unique characteristics of peer support user groups, and how they participate, contribute and communicate in these forums. This paper proposes and tests a novel approach that leverages stylometry analysis to uncover the unique characteristics of peer support user groups in such forums. Our approach identifies how each group empowers and supports other users, and what distinguishes them from others. The analysis shows that emotion-related words are crucial in identifying and distinguishing user groups based on their writing style. Comparative analysis of emotion expressions across user groups also uncovers the significance of emotional content in these forums in promoting mental well-being. Valued 'senior contributors' were more likely than all other groups including trained community guides to use a wide range of both positive and negative emotions in their posts. These findings have significant implications for improving the training of peer-mentors and moderators, scaling forum services, and improving guidelines for emotional expression among peer support users. Our approach presents an objective approach to differentiating the characteristics and communication patterns of valued senior contributors, mentors, and guides, enabling service providers to foster the kinds of communication that supports positive outcomes for distressed users., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Background: Resilience is an accepted strengths-based concept that responds to change, adversity, and crises. This concept underpins both personal and community-based preventive approaches to mental health issues and shapes digital interventions. Online mental health peer-support forums have played a prominent role in enhancing resilience by providing accessible places for sharing lived experiences of mental issues and finding support. However, little research has been conducted on whether and how resilience is realized, hindering service providers' ability to optimize resilience outcomes., Objective: This study aimed to create a resilience dictionary that reflects the characteristics and realization of resilience within online mental health peer-support forums. The findings can be used to guide further analysis and improve resilience outcomes in mental health forums through targeted moderation and management., Methods: A semiautomatic approach to creating a resilience dictionary was proposed using topic modeling and qualitative content analysis. We present a systematic 4-phase analysis pipeline that preprocesses raw forum posts, discovers core themes, conceptualizes resilience indicators, and generates a resilience dictionary. Our approach was applied to a mental health forum run by SANE (Schizophrenia: A National Emergency) Australia, with 70,179 forum posts between 2018 and 2020 by 2357 users being analyzed., Results: The resilience dictionary and taxonomy developed in this study, reveal how resilience indicators (ie, "social capital," "belonging," "learning," "adaptive capacity," and "self-efficacy") are characterized by themes commonly discussed in the forums; each theme's top 10 most relevant descriptive terms and their synonyms; and the relatedness of resilience, reflecting a taxonomy of indicators that are more comprehensive (or compound) and more likely to facilitate the realization of others. The study showed that the resilience indicators "learning," "belonging," and "social capital" were more commonly realized, and "belonging" and "learning" served as foundations for "social capital" and "adaptive capacity" across the 2-year study period., Conclusions: This study presents a resilience dictionary that improves our understanding of how aspects of resilience are realized in web-based mental health forums. The dictionary provides novel guidance on how to improve training to support and enhance automated systems for moderating mental health forum discussions., (©Yong-Bin Kang, Anthony McCosker, Peter Kamstra, Jane Farmer. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 22.09.2022.)

Background: Little is understood about the determinants of symptom expression in individuals with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). While individuals with FMS often report environmental influences, including weather events, on their symptom severity, a consistent effect of specific weather conditions on FMS symptoms has yet to be demonstrated. Content analysis of a large number of messages by individuals with FMS on Twitter can provide valuable insights into variation in the fibromyalgia experience from a first-person perspective., Objective: The objective of our study was to use content analysis of tweets to investigate the association between weather conditions and fibromyalgia symptoms among individuals who tweet about fibromyalgia. Our second objective was to gain insight into how Twitter is used as a form of communication and expression by individuals with fibromyalgia and to explore and uncover thematic clusters and communities related to weather., Methods: Computerized sentiment analysis was performed to measure the association between negative sentiment scores (indicative of severe symptoms such as pain) and coincident environmental variables. Date, time, and location data for each individual tweet were used to identify corresponding climate data (such as temperature). We used graph analysis to investigate the frequency and distribution of domain-related terms exchanged in Twitter and their association strengths. A community detection algorithm was applied to partition the graph and detect different communities., Results: We analyzed 140,432 tweets related to fibromyalgia from 2008 to 2014. There was a very weak positive correlation between humidity and negative sentiment scores (r=.009, P=.001). There was no significant correlation between other environmental variables and negative sentiment scores. The graph analysis showed that "pain" and "chronicpain" were the most frequently used terms. The Louvain method identified 6 communities. Community 1 was related to feelings and symptoms at the time (subjective experience). It also included a list of weather-related terms such as "weather," "cold," and "rain.", Conclusions: According to our results, a uniform causal effect of weather variation on fibromyalgia symptoms at the group level remains unlikely. Any impact of weather on fibromyalgia symptoms may vary geographically or at an individual level. Future work will further explore geographic variation and interactions focusing on individual pain trajectories over time., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest: None declared., (©Pari Delir Haghighi, Yong-Bin Kang, Rachelle Buchbinder, Frada Burstein, Samuel Whittle. Originally published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (http://publichealth.jmir.org), 19.01.2017.)