How Mental Health Self-Disclosure Becomes Visible: Evidence from Eight Conditions on Reddit
Human-Computer InteractionComputation and LanguageComputers and Society
Summary
The authors studied how people talk about their mental health diagnoses before and after sharing them on Reddit. They found that language showing mental health struggles often peaked right before people disclosed their diagnosis and stayed noticeable afterward for most conditions. People asked a lot about medical explanations before sharing, but this did not lead to more responses or community engagement. The authors suggest that sharing a diagnosis is just one step in a longer, uneven process of becoming visible online, and online engagement does not always match users' support needs.
Authors
Renkai Ma, Lingyao Li, Shanting Chen, Chen Chen, Fan Yang, Yuanyuan Lei
Abstract
People share mental health diagnoses on social media, yet how such language becomes visible around their self-disclosure, and whether community engagement tracks it, remain unexamined across conditions. We analyze 89,605 Reddit posts from 739 users across eight conditions, removing each user's diagnosis disclosure and aligning their surrounding posts to that anchor. Within the pre-disclosure year, language-visible burden was highest in the month before disclosure for six conditions, earlier for post-traumatic stress disorder and furthest from it for borderline personality disorder, and remained visible afterward rather than resolving. The theme Seeking Clinical Explanations showed the largest early-to-late difference before disclosure in five conditions, yet engagement rarely tracked what users wrote: only 9 of 360 language--engagement correlations survived correction. Disclosure is therefore a waypoint in an unevenly visible process, and we offer implications for community practice and platform design where engagement metrics do not reflect clinical need.