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Abstract
Online depression communities offer people with depressed symptoms new opportunities to obtain health information and provide social support for each other to fight against the depression. We sought to investigate whether usage of online community help improve depression outcomes and determine which types of usage behaviors have positive or negative effects on depression. We proposed that two dimensions of the sense of belonging (sense of identity and trust) and three dimensions of the sense of support (informational, emotional, and socializing) have significant effects on depression, and further considered gender difference and its effect on depression. We obtained a dataset consisting of 465,337 posts from 244 members from a popular online depression community to test all 10 proposed hypotheses. The results reveal that (i) the sense of shared identity, trust, informational support, and emotional support have positive effects on depression, while socializing support have negative effects on depression, and (ii) the sense of shared identity and trust have more positive effects on depression for female users than male users while socializing support has a more negative effect on depression for female users than for male users. The findings have important practical implications for designers and managers of online depression communities.
Highlights
Depression is considered to be associated with a range of negative outcomes, including cognitive impairment, substance abuse, self-harm and suicide [1]
In this study, we propose that motivation for users with depressed symptoms participation in virtual communities may be a desire to develop a sense of belonging to depression communities and a sense of support from other depression members
We adopted an empirical approach to investigate whether online community participation help improve depression outcomes and determine which types of usage behaviors have positive or negative effects on depression
Summary
Depression is considered to be associated with a range of negative outcomes, including cognitive impairment, substance abuse, self-harm and suicide [1]. There are some other barriers that prevent them from seeking clinical services, including the lack of necessary knowledge about diagnosis and treatment, privacy concerns, and so on. Especially peer support, is widely considered to be protective against depression [5]. Those suffering from depression have a severe fear of disclosing their mental illness and seeking help from others due to the stigma and discrimination associated with depression [6], which, in turn, prevents interactions with others and increases their feelings of social isolation
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