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The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting mental health, but it is not clear how people with different types of mental health problems were differentially impacted as the initial wave of cases hit.

The aim of this study is to leverage natural language processing (NLP) with the goal of characterizing changes in 15 of the world’s largest mental health support groups (eg, r/schizophrenia, r/SuicideWatch, r/Depression) found on the website Reddit, along with 11 non–mental health groups (eg, r/PersonalFinance, r/conspiracy) during the initial stage of the pandemic.

We created and released the Reddit Mental Health Dataset including posts from 826,961 unique users from 2018 to 2020. Using regression, we analyzed trends from 90 text-derived features such as sentiment analysis, personal pronouns, and semantic categories. Using supervised machine learning, we classified posts into their respective support groups and interpreted important features to understand how different problems manifest in language. We applied unsupervised methods such as topic modeling and unsupervised clustering to uncover concerns throughout Reddit before and during the pandemic.

We found that the r/HealthAnxiety forum showed spikes in posts about COVID-19 early on in January, approximately 2 months before other support groups started posting about the pandemic. There were many features that significantly increased during COVID-19 for specific groups including the categories “economic stress,” “isolation,” and “home,” while others such as “motion …