affecting all of us but certain people are probably more vulnerable.

Low, Laurie Rumker and Tanya Talkar, all PhD students in a Machine Learning for Healthcare class at MIT, decided the pandemic could be a lens through which they could approach the idea and Reddit could help them explore it.

Perhaps something in a person's language could signal symptoms. In their research, Low and his colleagues have been trying to understand the relationship between language and mental health, looking into whether language changes in a systematic way given different mental health issues, like depression versus schizophrenia. A report on The State of Mental Health in America showed that there are 5.1 million adults with a mental illness who are also uninsured.Īs research and reporting have revealed, the pandemic has intensified many of society's inequities and issues and ratcheted up the strain many already experience in their lives. Meanwhile, not everyone who needs care gets it. Suicide rates increased by 35% between 19, according to the CDC. Meanwhile, research has shown that loneliness was on the rise well before the pandemic even started. During this stressful time, when anyone might want to take refuge in a circle of friends and family, that solace has to come from the other side of a Zoom call.Īccording to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 1 in 5 American adults lives with a mental illness. For the past nine months, people have adapted their jobs, schooling, social lives and more to a new reality in which getting too close to other humans could prove detrimental to their health. It's no secret that the coronavirus pandemic has upended lives this year. 'It's affecting all of us but certain people are probably more vulnerable,' Daniel Low a graduate student in the Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard and MIT, as well as the lead author of the study, 'we found that is affecting certain groups more than others.' They found not only that anxiety surrounding health increased across subreddits, regardless of topic, but that there's reason for concern among specific mental health groups whose situation might be complicated or exacerbated by the hardships brought about by the pandemic. They also looked at 11 non-mental health subreddits like parenting and personal finance. In a study, published in The Journal of Medical Internet Research this month, the group used machine learning to analyze the text from more than 800,000 Reddit posts coming from 15 subreddits devoted specifically to topics like health anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, spanning from January to April.

A team of researchers from MIT and Harvard is working to understand the link between language and mental health during the pandemic - and they've turned to Reddit for answers.

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