mental health platform teams

Abstract: Most prior work on predicting mental health help-seeking treats it as post-hoc classification of users already active in clinical communities, which cannot tell whether someone approaching a transition can be identified in advance. We instead frame help-seeking as a time-to-event problem and ask which Reddit users will eventually seek mental health support, and how imminent that transition is. We build a two-arm cohort: a control frame of 6,337 ordinary users with genuine right-censoring (12.1% transition rate) to answer who will transition, and a clinical frame of 5,023 eventual transitioners to answer how soon. Features come only from posts written before any clinical activity, and user-grouped five-fold cross-validation plus a four-year temporal holdout guard against leakage. We compare TF-IDF, MentalBERT embeddings and behavioural activity features using Cox proportional hazards models, Random Survival Forests and an LSTM sequential model. Behavioural features alone outperform text for predicting who will seek help (C-index 0.797 vs. 0.763), and combining both is best (0.823 under cross-validation, 0.856 on the holdout). The pattern reverses for predicting how soon a known transition will happen: text remains a stable predictor (C-index 0.698) while behavioural features become unstable. Structural engagement patterns therefore carry information about future help-seeking beyond linguistic content, and separating who from when yields a cleaner analysis.

Abstract: Gratitude technologies support well-being by prompting reflection on what people appreciate. But gratitude does not serve the same purpose in every circumstance: as life situations change, so does what people seek from it, and whether it feels appropriate at all. To understand how technology can adapt to and support such shifts, we conducted retrospective, artifact-elicitation interviews with 17 adults who had practiced gratitude for one to fifteen years. Participants' appraisals of their situations shaped what they needed, yielding six recurring practice patterns, including a boundary where gratitude felt forced. We contribute the Adaptive Gratitude Practice Model, which explains how appraisals shifted even within the same life situation, how participants adapted activities, modalities, and rhythms, lapsed under competing demands or emotional unreadiness, and resumed when gratitude again felt useful. Additionally, we derive design implications for situated support, self-understanding through past records, and relational care with changing life situations.