Related papers: Bursts of Activity: Temporal Patterns of Help-Seek…
Mental illness is a global health problem, but access to mental healthcare resources remain poor worldwide. Online peer-to-peer support platforms attempt to alleviate this fundamental gap by enabling those who struggle with mental illness…
In recent years, online communities have formed around suicide and self-harm prevention. While these communities offer support in moment of crisis, they can also normalize harmful behavior, discourage professional treatment, and instigate…
Modern social platforms are characterized by the presence of rich user-behavior data associated with the publication, sharing and consumption of textual content. Users interact with content and with each other in a complex and dynamic…
Due to the worldwide accessibility to the Internet along with the continuous advances in mobile technologies, physical and digital worlds have become completely blended, and the proliferation of social media platforms has taken a leading…
Identifying changes in individuals' behaviour and mood, as observed via content shared on online platforms, is increasingly gaining importance. Most research to-date on this topic focuses on either: (a) identifying individuals at risk or…
Platforms like Reddit and Twitter offer internet users an opportunity to talk about diverse issues, including those pertaining to physical and mental health. Some of these forums also function as a safe space for severely distressed mental…
Online mental health support communities have grown in recent years for providing accessible mental and emotional health support through volunteer counselors. Despite millions of people participating in chat support on these platforms, the…
Recommender systems on social media increasingly mediate how users encounter mental health content, yet it remains unclear whether they distinguish help-seeking from distress expression. We conduct a controlled 7-day audit of TikTok's "For…
People communicate with those who have the same background or share a common interest by using a social networking service (SNS). News or messages propagate through inhomogeneous connections in an SNS by sharing or facilitating additional…
The increase in the prevalence of mental health problems has coincided with a growing popularity of health related social networking sites. Regardless of their therapeutic potential, On-line Support Groups (OSGs) can also have negative…
Millions of users on the Internet discuss a variety of topics on Question-and-Answer (Q&A) instances. However, not all instances and topics receive the same amount of attention, as some thrive and achieve self-sustaining levels of activity,…
In the era of social media, every day billions of individuals produce content in socio-technical systems resulting in a deluge of information. However, human attention is a limited resource and it is increasingly challenging to consume the…
Large language models are increasingly used for mental health support, yet little is known about whether their responses are psychologically safe across different help-seeking styles. We examine a foundational distinction in emotional…
Since the advent of online social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, useful health-related studies have been conducted using the information posted by online participants. Personal health-related issues such as mental health,…
Records of social interactions provide us with new sources of data for understanding how interaction patterns affect collective dynamics. Such human activity patterns are often bursty, i.e., they consist of short periods of intense activity…
Purpose: With the rise of mental health risks globally, it is urgent to provide effective mental health support. However, a holistic understanding of how people seek help for mental health problems remains limited, impeding the development…
A salient dynamic property of social media is bursting behavior. In this paper, we study bursting behavior in terms of the temporal relation between a preceding baseline fluctuation and the successive burst response using a frequency time…
Online support communities have become vital spaces offering varied forms of support to individuals facing mental health challenges. Despite the proliferation of platforms with distinct technical structures, little is known about how these…
Social networks have become an increasingly common abstraction to capture the interactions of individual users in a number of everyday activities and applications. As a result, the analysis of such networks has attracted lots of attention…
The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of…