FRAMING DEPRESSION IN ONLINE FORUM COMMUNITIES

The research project “Discursive framing of depression in online forum communities” is carried out at Eötvös Loránd University.

IDENTIFYING THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

The e-mental health communities have become particularly important since the COVID-19 epidemic: social distancing and quarantine rules have not only increased mental burdens, but also prevented face-to-face counselling. Thus, more and more people started to seek help online. This trend served as the starting point for this research, which examined the impact of COVID-19 on lay, forum-based discourses on depression.

Depression is a disease of modernity, where societies place more responsibility on the individual, while they have no power to change their circumstances. It is an important question in the sociology of mental health how therapists and patients themselves frame depression, or how the therapists’ reinterpretation shifts the emphasis on social suffering towards mental illness.

In our research we explore the potential of NLP methods in understanding the framing of depression at the individual level in online peer communities. The discursive framing of depression is a social construct, which determines the meaning of depression for the patient and the practitioner by offering causal explanations and even outlining the horizon of treatments.

THE EXPECTED SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS OF THE RESEARCH

Previously, discursive framing in this area has been approached primarily qualitatively through the analysis of offline texts (diaries, letters, interviews). We believe that the non-clinical writings of online patient communities in digital society offer a good field for exploring this issue and that automated text analytic methods offer significant research potential in this area.

Research website: https://rc2s2.elte.hu/en/project/discursive-framing-of-depression-in-online-health-communities/

CONTACT

Domonkos SIK habil. associate professor (ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences)
sik.domonkos@tatk.elte.hu
MTMT