  Recently, research on mental health conditions using public online data,
including Reddit, has surged in NLP and health research but has not reported
user characteristics, which are important to judge generalisability of
findings. This paper shows how existing NLP methods can yield information on
clinical, demographic, and identity characteristics of almost 20K Reddit users
who self-report a bipolar disorder diagnosis. This population consists of
slightly more feminine- than masculine-gendered mainly young or middle-aged
US-based adults who often report additional mental health diagnoses, which is
compared with general Reddit statistics and epidemiological studies.
Additionally, this paper carefully evaluates all methods and discusses ethical
issues.
