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Privacy Discourse and Emotional Dynamics in Mental Health Information Interaction on Reddit

Jai Kruthunz Naveen Kumar, Aishwarya Umeshkumar Surani, Harkirat Singh, Sanchari Das

TL;DR

The paper investigates how privacy concerns arise and evolve in Reddit communities discussing mental health, contrasting them with regulatory-focused spaces. It combines a large-scale data collection (over 10k posts, 65k+ comments across 14 subreddits) with lexicon-based sentiment analysis, topic tagging for privacy themes, and robust statistics (ANOVA, Chi-Square, Wilcoxon) to reveal how privacy discourse co-varies with emotion. Key findings include strong sentiment alignment within mental-health subreddits, a roughly 50% rise in privacy-related discussions from 2020 to 2025, and domain-specific patterns in how privacy issues are discussed, with regulatory forums more engaged on HIPAA/GDPR topics and tech forums on data breaches. The results have practical implications for designing privacy-aware digital mental-health environments and governance frameworks, especially around surfacing privacy cues to support safer, more informed disclosures.

Abstract

Reddit is a major venue for mental-health information interaction and peer support, where privacy concerns increasingly surface in user discourse. Thus, we analyze privacy-related discussions across 14 mental-health and regulatory subreddits, comprising 10,119 posts and 65,385 comments collected with a custom web scraper. Using lexicon-based sentiment analysis, we quantify emotional alignment between communities via cosine similarity of sentiment distributions, observing high similarity for Bipolar and ADHD (0.877), Anxiety and Depression (0.849), and MentalHealthSupport and MentalIllness (0.989) subreddits. We also construct keyword dictionaries to tag privacy-related themes (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR) and perform temporal analysis from 2020 to 2025, finding a 50% increase in privacy discourse with intermittent regulatory spikes. A chi-square test of independence across subreddit domains indicates significant distributional differences. The results characterize how privacy-oriented discussion co-varies with user sentiment in online mental-health communities.

Privacy Discourse and Emotional Dynamics in Mental Health Information Interaction on Reddit

TL;DR

The paper investigates how privacy concerns arise and evolve in Reddit communities discussing mental health, contrasting them with regulatory-focused spaces. It combines a large-scale data collection (over 10k posts, 65k+ comments across 14 subreddits) with lexicon-based sentiment analysis, topic tagging for privacy themes, and robust statistics (ANOVA, Chi-Square, Wilcoxon) to reveal how privacy discourse co-varies with emotion. Key findings include strong sentiment alignment within mental-health subreddits, a roughly 50% rise in privacy-related discussions from 2020 to 2025, and domain-specific patterns in how privacy issues are discussed, with regulatory forums more engaged on HIPAA/GDPR topics and tech forums on data breaches. The results have practical implications for designing privacy-aware digital mental-health environments and governance frameworks, especially around surfacing privacy cues to support safer, more informed disclosures.

Abstract

Reddit is a major venue for mental-health information interaction and peer support, where privacy concerns increasingly surface in user discourse. Thus, we analyze privacy-related discussions across 14 mental-health and regulatory subreddits, comprising 10,119 posts and 65,385 comments collected with a custom web scraper. Using lexicon-based sentiment analysis, we quantify emotional alignment between communities via cosine similarity of sentiment distributions, observing high similarity for Bipolar and ADHD (0.877), Anxiety and Depression (0.849), and MentalHealthSupport and MentalIllness (0.989) subreddits. We also construct keyword dictionaries to tag privacy-related themes (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR) and perform temporal analysis from 2020 to 2025, finding a 50% increase in privacy discourse with intermittent regulatory spikes. A chi-square test of independence across subreddit domains indicates significant distributional differences. The results characterize how privacy-oriented discussion co-varies with user sentiment in online mental-health communities.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 12 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Method
  3. Data Collection and Cleaning
  4. Analysis
  5. Results and Discussion
  6. Sentiment Analysis : Mental Health
  7. Privacy-related Discussions
  8. Sentiment Shifts
  9. Emergence of Privacy Concerns
  10. Limitations and Future Work
  11. Conclusion
  12. Acknowledgment

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Heatmap Illustrating Similarity of Sentiment Patterns Across Mental Health Subreddits and Topics
  • Figure 2: Sentiment Distribution Before and After Privacy and Data Access Discussions (Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test)
  • Figure 3: Time Series Analysis Showing Monthly Discussion Trends in Privacy and Mental Health Discussions on Reddit