Abstract
Online inquiry platforms, which is where a person can anonymously ask questions, have become an important information source for those who are concerned about social stigma and discrimination that follow mental disorders. Therefore, examining what people inquire about regarding mental disorders would be useful when designing educational programs for communities. The present study aimed to examine the contents of the queries regarding mental disorders that were posted on online inquiry platforms. A total of 4,714 relevant queries from the two major online inquiry platforms were collected. We computed word frequencies, centralities, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The words like symptom, hospital and treatment ranked as the most frequently used words, and the word my appeared to have the highest centrality. LDA identified four latent topics: (1) the understanding of general symptoms, (2) a disability grading system and welfare entitlement, (3) stressful life events, and (4) social adaptation with mental disorders. People are interested in practical information concerning mental disorders, such as social benefits, social adaptation, more general information about the symptoms and the treatments. Our findings suggest that instructions encompassing different scopes of information are needed when developing educational programs.
Highlights
Coupled with the rapid expansion of Internet access, individuals have been actively utilizing online inquiry platforms when seeking health information [1]
We found that the word my showed the highest degree centrality (DC) (0.78), betweenness centrality (BC) (0.77), closeness centrality (CC) (0.80), and eigenvector centrality (EC) (0.36)
This study proposed the use of text-mining approaches to detect queries concerning mental disorders which are posted on online inquiry platforms
Summary
Coupled with the rapid expansion of Internet access, individuals have been actively utilizing online inquiry platforms when seeking health information [1]. Online inquiry platforms are a unique information source where users could anonymously but still interpersonally exchange sensitive health information. When it comes to mental disorders, using online inquiry platforms have become more salient compared with physical diseases, because the stigmatization of these types of disorders discourage people to ask for a face-to-face consultation [2]. Several studies have found this tendency across different cultures [3,4,5] Using these online inquiry platforms is especially thriving in the Korean society, which is mostly due to the fact that Koreans are often reluctant to disclose their sensitive health-relevant issues [6]. Exploring these online inquiry platforms where people would frankly open up their concerns and questions would be a great
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