Phrase-level pairwise topic modeling to uncover helpful peer responses to online suicidal crises

Abstract

Suicide is a serious public health problem; however, suicides are preventable with timely, evidence-based interventions. Social media platforms have been serving users who are experiencing real-time suicidal crises with hopes of receiving peer support. To better understand the helpfulness of peer support occurring online, this study characterizes the content of both a user's post and corresponding peer comments occurring on a social media platform and present an empirical example for comparison. It introduces an approach that uses pairwise topic models to transform large corpora of discussion into associated topics of user and peer posts. The key advantages of this approach include: (i) modeling both the generative process of each type of the corpora (i.e., user posts and peer comments) and the associations between them, and (ii) using phrases, which are more informative and less ambiguous than words, in addition to words, to represent social media posts and topics. The study evaluated the method using data from Reddit r/SuicideWatch. It examined how the topics of user and peer posts were associated and how this information influenced the peer perceived helpfulness of the peer support. Then, this study applied structural topic modeling to data collected from individuals with a history of suicidal crisis as a means to validate findings. The observations suggest that effective modeling of the association between the two lines of topics can uncover helpful peer responses to online suicidal crises, notably providing the suggestion of professional help. The proposed technology can be applied to "paired" corpora in many applications, such as technical support forums, question-answering sites, and online medical services.

It’s quality and quantity: the effect of the amount of comments on online suicidal posts

“…Non-professional online support groups for suicide are often considered dangerous in that untrained peers may invalidate emotions or inspire more suicidal thoughts and behaviors (Niederkrotenthaler et al, 2016). However, prior research on Reddit has shown responses are generally positive (Jiang et al, 2020). This may be due to strict moderation that removes responses containing guilt-tripping (e.g., one SW guideline asks to report "abuse or 'tough love' including any guilt-tripping like 'suicide is selfish' or 'think of your loved ones'"), prosuicide comments, or descriptions of suicide methods.…”

“…Given how difficult treating suicidal thoughts and behaviors has shown to be (Bentley et al, 2020), it is likely that positive peer responses may only provide in-the-moment reduction given effective treatment for STBs include cognitive behavioral therapy, mindful emotion awareness, generating cognitive flexibility, emotion exposure and learning skills that prevent crises for when therapy is discontinued (Bentley et al, 2020). Therefore, positive comments on Reddit that include validating emotions, providing resources towards more professional help such as crisis hotlines, and keeping the user socially supported (Jiang et al, 2020) should result not in less likelihood of returning but rather in re-engaging with the platform when or if symptoms return. Furthermore, out of the users posting on SW a second time, it does not seem to be the case that users are generally returning to express signs of improvement; we found measures of suicidality concerns (as approximated through custom lexicons) remain similar between first and second posts (see Fig.…”

“…When analyzing the content and quality of peer responses to suicidal posts on social media, prior work has found that responses are generally positive (Naslund et al, 2016;Fu et al, 2013;Li et al, 2015;Jiang et al, 2020;O'dea et al, 2018), suggesting that peer responses may be helpful peerdelivered interventions. One study of the subreddit r/SuicideWatch (SW) found that posters rated the most helpful peer responses as including professional help suggestion (e.g., "Have you tried getting any professional help?…”

“…. "), and relationship/loss support (e.g., "I am really sorry for your loss...") (Jiang et al, 2020). Another study found that online users in non-professional suicide forums tend to see reductions in the symptoms of their suicidal ideation when responses to their posts include constructive active listening, collaborative problem-solving, constructive advice, debunking of public suicide myths, alternatives to suicide, stories of lived experience, and recommendations of help services (Niederkrotenthaler et al, 2016).…”

“…Another study found that online users in non-professional suicide forums tend to see reductions in the symptoms of their suicidal ideation when responses to their posts include constructive active listening, collaborative problem-solving, constructive advice, debunking of public suicide myths, alternatives to suicide, stories of lived experience, and recommendations of help services (Niederkrotenthaler et al, 2016). In Jiang et al (2020) the most frequent response type was asking questions (e.g., "What kinds of things in the past have you tried that have helped you cope before? "), compared to treatment and medication (e.g., "I recommend medication for anxiety"), which was both the least frequent and lowest-rated response in terms of perceived helpfulness.…”