Depression in times of a pandemic – the impact of COVID-19 on the lay discourses of e-mental health communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article aims at exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lay discourses of depression emerging in online mental health forums. The narrative framing of depression plays a central role not only because it affects the instrumental strategies of depressed people (e.g., preferred therapy), but also because it is a constitutive element of the identity of depressed people, thus affects the process of recovery itself. COVID-19 had a serious impact on people living with mental disorders (especially depression and anxiety), thus our research aimed at mapping the consequences of these transformations on a discursive level. A textual dataset of English language online health forums was collected (n = 339,550 publicly available entries posted between 15 February 2016 and 31 December 2020). Structural topic modelling was used to explore the various discursive patterns characterizing the pre-pandemic and pandemic era. Our results show that the pandemic did not take over the discursive space of depression forums, yet it transformed many aspects of it: a new horizon of critique opened up; the biomedical authority was reinforced; the ego-centric perspectives were refined; the previously unquestionable discursive frames become fragmented; and the horizon of emergency overshadowed the previous risk perspective.