Unveiling online suicide behavior: What can we learn about mental health from suicide survivors of Reddit?

Abstract

Suicide is a growing public health concern in online communities. In this paper, we analyze online communications on the topic of suicide in the social networking platform, Reddit. We combine lexical text characteristics with semantic information to identify comments with features of suicide attempts and methods. Then, we develop a set of machine learning methods to automatically extract suicide methods and classify the user comments. Our classification methods performance varied between suicide experiences, with F1-scores up to 0.92 for "drugs'' and greater than 0.82 for "hanging" and "other methods''. Our exploratory analysis reveals that the most frequent reported suicide methods are drug overdose, hanging, and wrist-cutting.