Speaker
Description
Social stigma and feelings of helplessness make it difficult for young people to seek face-to-face counselling for mental health problems and suicidality, however, due to its anonymity and convenience, the internet has proven to be an efficient tool in overcoming those barriers. Especially online health communities and online counselling services can be an important source of easily accessible information and anonymous support, including when it comes to mental health issues and problems. Unfortunately, due to a lack of face-to-face interaction and limited availability of non-verbal and visual cues, there is a decrease in mutual awareness of concerns and interests between patients and health professionals. To mitigate these limitations and optimize our effectiveness in providing patient care, it is beneficial to conduct a thorough analysis of posts within health community forums.
Therefore, the linguistic text analysis of more than 19 thousand questions and answers in the online counselling service will be presented. The data were obtained by the Slovenian largest and oldest online counselling service for young people This is Me for the period between 2012 and 2021. A special attention will be given to compare the sentiment of questions and answers among different sub-themes within the suicide questions, controlling for some users’ characteristics such as gender and age. The analysis included word clouds, hierarchical clustering, sentiment analysis and multiple linear regression.
Results showed that themes related to problems at home and at school and themes related to serious mental illness emerge with suicide-themed questions. We found that counsellors’ responses in general reflected a positive sentiment in suicide question types, although users had a highly more negative sentiment here. The sentiment in the service is also influenced by other factors such as gender and age.
Findings provide insight into the communication dynamics and counselling style in terms of sentiment between adolescents and counsellors, which could be helpful to the editors of such online counselling services.
