Natural Language Processing Reveals Vulnerable Mental Health Support Groups and Heightened Health Anxiety on Reddit During COVID-19: Observational Study

Daniel M Low   ^{1, 2, 3} , MSc ;   Laurie Rumker   ^{4, 5, 6, 7 *} , MSc ;   Tanya Talkar   ^{1, 8 *} , MEng ;   John Torous   ⁹ , MBI, MD ;   Guillermo Cecchi   ¹⁰ , PhD ;   Satrajit S Ghosh   ^{1, 3, 11} , PhD

¹ Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

² Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

³ McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

⁴ Center for Data Sciences, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

⁵ Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

⁶ Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, United States

⁷ Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

⁸ Human Health and Performance Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, United States

⁹ Digital Psychiatry Division, Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

¹⁰ Thomas J Watson Research Center, IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY, United States

¹¹ Department of Otolaryngology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

*these authors contributed equally