How 'mental Health' Is Perceived and Reproduced in the Digital World

Background: The COVID19 pandemic have thrust mental health concerns to the forefront of public health, as individuals struggle with fears of transmission, and social isolation. While the authorization and distribution of vaccine, gives hope to adjusting to post-pandemic life, mental health professionals warn about the lingering effects of the pandemic on mental health. For Asian Americans, the effects of COVID19 on mental health is further exacerbated by structural barriers of racism they face as evidenced in increased hate crimes against Asian Americans such as Atlanta shootings of Asian American women. To understand the cumulative effects of sociocultural and political influences on Asian American mental health, it is critical to understand how Asian Americans understand mental health using a ‘bottom-to-top’ approach. This study investigates the everyday understanding of mental health of Asian Americans through exploring how mental health is represented in the digital world, specifically through reddit, a social media platform.

Method: This study examined data from web-scraping from selected reddit communities. Two subreddit were selected, 1) the Mental Health’ subreddit (MH) which is a platform centered on mental health messages from the general population, and 2) ‘Asian American Channel’ subreddit (AA) which is an ethnic specific domain where Asian American can post. Using python, 200 comments related to mental health from 2020-21 for each subreddit was accessed and web-scrapped. Text analysis were utilized to analyze the data. Using sentiment intensity analyzer, positive or negative attitude in comments was measured. Next, word frequency analysis was employed to identify frequently used words.

Results: From MH subreddit, general populations’ comments related with mental health showed positive attitudes towards mental health. This indicated that most people had positive views of mental health. However, comments from the AA subreddit showed a bimodal pattern of high frequencies of positive and negative score but the negative scores were more prominent than positive. This differences in attitude may reflect the taboo on mental health that previous studies has reported. The word frequency analysis revealed that for the MH reddit, the words related to mental health were “good, new, sure, online, favorite”. In contrast, for the AA subreddit, mental health was associated with the words “white, black, American, social, Chinese, pandemic” were frequently used. The findings illustrate that for AAs the effect of racial relations is associated with comments on mental health.

Conclusions: Mental health related comments varied among AA and other groups. When producing ‘mental health’ related comments, AAs showed both extremely positive and negative attitudes whereas others reported mostly positive attitudes. This suggests that attitudes toward ‘mental health’ differs across ethnic/racial groups, and highlights that a unilateral approach to raising awareness of mental health may not be appropriate. Furthermore, frequently used words in reddit comments also reflected different views on mental health by Asian American and others. Other’s comments revealed why they feel positive about mental health and ways to engage with better services. However, AA’s comments related with mental health focused on why mental health issues ever started among AA such as conflicts in racial relationships.