Studying Differential Mental Health Expressions in India

Anonymous

TL;DR: Mental health expressions of Indian population differ from Western population. This paper investigates how.

Abstract: Psychosocial stressors and the symptomatology of mental disorders are known to vary with socio-cultural environment. Mental health expressions on social media, however, are primarily informed by studies in the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) contexts. In this paper, we analyze mental health posts made on Reddit by individuals in India, the most populous country in the World, to identify psycho-social categories and themes specific to the Indian context compared to Reddit users located in the Rest of the World (ROW), predominantly the United States. Contrary to findings in Western samples, mental health discussions in India are present-focused and are about work and achievement-related topics. Psycho-social category, \textit{illness} is exclusively correlated with mental health posts originating from India, reaffirming the link between somatic symptoms and mental disorders in Indian patients. Two clinical psychologists practicing in India labeled 95\% of the top-20 topics associated with mental health discussions as \textit{prevalent} in Indians. Significant linguistic variations in online mental health-related language originating from India vs. ROW, highlight the need for precision culturally-aware machine learning models. These findings have important implications for designing culturally appropriate interventions to reduce the growing diagnosis and treatment gap for mental disorders in India.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English