Using Natural Language Processing Methods to Build the Hypersexuality in Bipolar Reddit Corpus: Infodemiology Study of Reddit.

Résumé

BACKGROUND: Bipolar is a severe mental health condition affecting at least 2% of the global population, with clinical observations suggesting that individuals experiencing elevated mood states, such as mania or hypomania, may have an increased propensity for engaging in risk-taking behaviors, including hypersexuality. Hypersexuality has historically been stigmatized in society and in health care provision, which makes it more difficult for service users to talk about their behaviors. There is a need for greater understanding of hypersexuality to develop better evidence-based treatment, support, and training for health professionals.OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to develop and assess effective methodologies for identifying posts on Reddit related to hypersexuality posted by people with a self-reported bipolar diagnosis. Using natural language processing techniques, this research presents a specialized dataset, the Talking About Bipolar on Reddit Corpus (TABoRC). We used various computational tools to filter and categorize posts that mentioned hypersexuality, forming the Hypersexuality in Bipolar Reddit Corpus (HiB-RC). This paper introduces a novel methodology for detecting hypersexuality-related conversations on Reddit and offers both methodological insights and preliminary findings, laying the groundwork for further research in this emerging field.METHODS: A toolbox of computational linguistic methods was used to create the corpora and infer demographic variables for the Redditors in the dataset. The key psychological domains in the corpus were measured using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and a topic model was built using BERTopic to identify salient language clusters. This paper also discusses ethical considerations associated with this type of analysis.RESULTS: The TABoRC is a corpus of 6,679,485 posts from 5177 Redditors, and the HiB-RC is a corpus totaling 2146 posts from 816 Redditors. The results demonstrate that, between 2012 and 2021, there was a 91.65% average yearly increase in posts in the HiB-RC (SD 119.6%) compared to 48.14% in the TABoRC (SD 51.2%) and an 86.97% average yearly increase in users (SD 93.8%) compared to 27.17% in the TABoRC (SD 38.7%). These statistics suggest that there was an increase in posting activity related to hypersexuality that exceeded the increase in general Reddit use over the same period. Several key psychological domains were identified as significant in the HiB-RC (P