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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…
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…
There has been a significant expansion in the use of online social networks (OSNs) to support people experiencing mental health issues. This paper studies the role of Instagram influencers who specialize in coaching people with mental…
Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key…
Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors…
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…
Culture moderates the way individuals perceive and express mental distress. Current understandings of mental health expressions on social media, however, are predominantly derived from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and…
Online Social Networking may be a way to support health professionals' need for continuous learning through interaction with peers and experts. Understanding and evaluating such learning is important but difficult, and Social Network…
Humans use language to accomplish a wide variety of tasks - asking for and giving advice being one of them. In online advice forums, advice is mixed in with non-advice, like emotional support, and is sometimes stated explicitly, sometimes…
Providing mental health support for loved ones across a geographic distance creates unique challenges for the remote caregivers, who sometimes turn to online communities for peer support. We qualitatively analyzed 522 Reddit threads to…
Peer support plays a vital role in expanding access to mental health care by providing empathetic, community-based support outside formal clinical systems. As digital platforms increasingly mediate such support, the design and impact of…
Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs), such as Reddit, have witnessed a surge in popularity as go-to platforms for seeking information and support in managing mental health needs. Platforms like Reddit offer immediate interactions with…
Communication success relies heavily on reading participants' reactions. Such feedback is especially important for mental health counselors, who must carefully consider the client's progress and adjust their approach accordingly. However,…
Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support. \emph{Peer support}, grounded in lived experience, offers a valuable complement to professional care. However,…
There exists an invisible barrier between healthcare professionals' perception of a patient's clinical experience and the reality. This barrier may be induced by the environment that hinders patients from sharing their experiences openly…
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…
Social media usage has been shown to have both positive and negative consequences for users' mental health. Several studies indicated that peer feedback plays an important role in the relationship between social media use and mental health.…
Huge volumes of patient queries are daily generated on online health forums, rendering manual doctor allocation a labor-intensive task. To better help patients, this paper studies a novel task of doctor recommendation to enable automatic…
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…
During the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, subreddits on Reddit, such as r/Coronavirus saw a rapid growth in user's requests for help (support seekers - SSs) including individuals with varying professions and experiences with diverse perspectives…