The Structure of Psychopathology on Reddit: Network Analysis of Mental Health Communities in Relation to the ICD Diagnostic System.

Résumé

BACKGROUND: Social media platforms such as Reddit have become important spaces where individuals articulate their distress, seek support, and explore alternative ways of understanding mental health outside traditional institutional frameworks. These environments provide an opportunity to examine mental health discourse at scale, offering perspectives that extend beyond traditional clinical and research settings.OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine the structure of mental health communities on Reddit by identifying patterns of association between mental disorders reflected in user activity and assessing how these relationships align with established diagnostic categories in the ICD (International Classification of Diseases).METHODS: We manually curated 114 Reddit communities focused on specific mental health conditions from the 20,000 most active subreddits in 2022. Each community was labeled into 49 disorders and categorized under 9 ICD diagnostic categories within the group of mental and behavioral disorders, collectively known as the F codes. We constructed a disorder association network by identifying statistically significant user overlaps based on coposting across subreddit pairs using a bipartite configuration model, with Bonferroni-corrected significance (P