Reddit Mental Health Dataset

This dataset contains posts from 28 subreddits (15 mental health support groups) from 2018-2020. We used this dataset to understand the impact of COVID-19 on mental health support groups from January to April, 2020 and included older timeframes to obtain baseline posts before COVID-19.

Please cite if you use this dataset:

Low, D. M., Rumker, L., Torous, J., Cecchi, G., Ghosh, S. S., & Talkar, T. (2020). Natural Language Processing Reveals Vulnerable Mental Health Support Groups and Heightened Health Anxiety on Reddit During COVID-19: Observational Study. Journal of medical Internet research, 22(10), e22635.

@article{low2020natural,
title={Natural Language Processing Reveals Vulnerable Mental Health Support Groups and Heightened Health Anxiety on Reddit During COVID-19: Observational Study},
author={Low, Daniel M and Rumker, Laurie and Torous, John and Cecchi, Guillermo and Ghosh, Satrajit S and Talkar, Tanya},
journal={Journal of medical Internet research},
volume={22},
number={10},
pages={e22635},
year={2020},
publisher={JMIR Publications Inc., Toronto, Canada}
}

License

This dataset is made available under the Public Domain Dedication and License v1.0 whose full text can be found at: http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/

It was downloaded using pushshift API. Re-use of this data is subject to Reddit API terms.

Reddit Mental Health Dataset

Contains posts and text features for the following timeframes from 28 mental health and non-mental health subreddits:

15 specific mental health support groups (r/EDAnonymous, r/addiction, r/alcoholism, r/adhd, r/anxiety, r/autism, r/bipolarreddit, r/bpd, r/depression, r/healthanxiety, r/lonely, r/ptsd, r/schizophrenia, r/socialanxiety, and r/suicidewatch)

2 broad mental health subreddits (r/mentalhealth, r/COVID19_support)

11 non-mental health subreddits (r/conspiracy, r/divorce, r/fitness, r/guns, r/jokes, r/legaladvice, r/meditation, r/parenting, r/personalfinance, r/relationships, r/teaching).

filenames and corresponding timeframes:

post: Jan 1 to April 20, 2020 (called "mid-pandemic" in manuscript; r/COVID19_support appears). Unique users: 320,364. 

pre: Dec 2018 to Dec 2019. A full year which provides more data for a baseline of Reddit posts. Unique users: 327,289.

2019: Jan 1 to April 20, 2019 (r/EDAnonymous appears). A control for seasonal fluctuations to match post data. Unique users: 282,560.

2018: Jan 1 to April 20, 2018. A control for seasonal fluctuations to match post data. Unique users: 177,089

Unique users across all time windows (pre and 2019 overlap): 826,961.

See manuscript Supplementary Materials (https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xvwcy) for more information.

Note: if subsampling (e.g., to balance subreddits), we recommend bootstrapping analyses for unbiased results.