## 1. Code
https://github.com/danielmlow/reddit
## 2. Data
**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.
### 2.1. Reddit Mental Health Dataset
Find in `data/input/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)
- `pre:` Dec 2018 to Dec 2019. A full year which provides more data for a baseline of Reddit posts
- `2019:` Jan 1 to April 20, 2019 (r/EDAnonymous appears). A control for seasonal fluctuations to match `post` data.
- `2018:` Jan 1 to April 20, 2018. A control for seasonal fluctuations to match `post` data.
See Supplementary Materials for more information.
Note: if subsampling (e.g., to balance subreddits), we recommend bootstrapping analyses for unbiased results.
### 2.2. COVID-19 mention dataset (Figure 1)
find in `data/input/covid19_counts/`
Same posts as in `post` above for 15 mental health subreddits.
Counting these tokens: `'corona','virus','viral','covid', 'sars','influenza','pandemic', 'epidemic',
'quarantine','lockdown', 'distancing', 'national emergency', 'flatten',
'infect','ventilator', 'mask','symptomatic',
'epidemiolog', 'immun', 'incubation', 'transmission','vaccine'
`
* One column `covid19_boolean`: if one of these words appears at least once (Figure 1)
* One column `covid19_total`: total count of words
* One column `covid19_weighed_words`: total count of words normalized by the amount of words (n_words) in a post (Figure S3).
### 2.3. COVID-19 cases
Confirmed COVID-19 cases obtained from ourworldindata.org/covid-cases (source: European CDC).
