Help Oneself In Helping The Others: The Ecology Of Online Support Groups

With the increasing popularity of online support. groups, more and more people turn to the web for mental health support. However, the effectiveness of such online communities has not been quantified or evaluated. Taking advantage of the rich textual data in an online health forum DailyStrength, we propose a novel approach to quantifying individual users' recovery process based on the linguistic features in their posts. In addition, we conduct a fine-grained analysis on the role of demographics in the forum users' mental status. Our experimental results suggest that the users of the online support groups experience significant improvements along the three dimensions in the recovery process including symptoms, life satisfaction, and self-esteem.