Age-Specific Linguistic Features of Depression via Social Media (2023)

Abstract: Social media data has become a crucial resource for understanding and detecting mental health challenges. However, there is a significant gap in our understanding of age-specific linguistic markers associated with classifying depression. This study bridges the gap by analyzing 25,241 text samples from 15,156 Reddit users with self-reported depression across two age groups: adolescents (13-20 year olds) and adults (21+). Through a quantitative exploratory analysis using LIWC, topic modeling, and data visualization, distinct patterns and topical differences emerged in the language of depression for adolescents and adults, including social concerns, temporal focuses, emotions, and cognition. These findings enhance our understanding of how depression is expressed on social media, bearing implications for accurate classification and tailored interventions across different age groups.

## introduction depression, a prevalent mental health condition that impacts over 300 million individuals worldwide @xcite , has historically been approached with a generalization that it impacts all individuals in the same way. however, in recent years, there has been a growing recognition of depression's impact on specific subgroups, including teens and young children @xcite . recent research has found that depression manifests differently for individuals at different stages of life @xcite . this shift in perspective underscores the importance of exploring the causes and correlates of emotional distress specific to different age groups. it is crucial to observe and understand the unique linguistic markers of depression in different age groups, as indicators of depression for adults may not hold true when applied to adolescent populations, and vice versa. this "one-size-fits-all" approach can lead to misdiagnosis, inappropriate interventions, and limited access to suitable support services, thus jeopardizing the well-being of individuals @xcite . given the absence of a comprehensive global surveillance system and the rapid evolution of global health trends, there is an imperative need to gather up-to-date insights on the impact of mental health disorders of different subpopulations @xcite . recently, there has been a surge of interest in leveraging social media data to gain valuable psychological insights @xcite . analyzing social media data has been proven to complement traditional mental health assessments, including the patient health questionnaire-9 @xcite and the behavioral risk factor surveillance system (bfrss) survey @xcite . due to the growing popularity of social media platforms for receiving online peer support among those facing mental health challenges, social media data has demonstrated potential for reflecting greater sociological trends. most social media investigations of mental health have either overlooked age as a feature or focused solely on the platforms' predominant young adult populations @xcite . however, it is important to recognize that age-based expression of different subgroups may significantly differ; per the principles of postcolonial computing, analytical insight and intervention strategies cannot be simply transplanted from one subgroup to another without modification @xcite . each age group has its unique context and characteristics that must be considered to ensure the relevance and effectiveness of intervention strategies. this study quantitatively examines language use in individuals sharing their experiences with depres-sion on social media, specifically on reddit. two age groups-adolescents (below 21) and adults (above 21)-are analyzed to explore two primary questions: (1) how do these groups differ in expressing their depression on social media? and (2) how do they differ compared to neurotypical individuals of the same age group? the contributions of this paper are twofold: first, prior research on the existence of language markers that distinguish depression on social media is affirmed through comparative analyses with control users; second, linguistic insights into age-specific markers of depression are revealed using closed-and open-vocabulary approaches. the findings provide a nuanced understanding of how depression manifests on online social media platforms, laying the foundation for future hypothesis-driven research on mental health diagnosis and treatment strategies tailored to different age groups. ## data reddit, an online discussion-based social media platform, was selected as the data source for this study. the platform encourages self-disclosure by enforcing anonymity of users, which can contribute to obtaining less biased results @xcite ). an initial collection of 512,876 reddit posts was collected from the r/depression, r/suicidewatch, and r/mentalhealth subreddits. this included the 252,459 posts extracted from the r/depression, r/mentalhealth, and r/suicidewatch subreddits of the reddit mental health dataset proposed by low et al. (2020) and 7,000 r/depression reddit posts from the dataset of pirina and c ¸agri c ¸öltekin (2018). the rest of the posts were obtained directly from reddit using the praw api. ## methods reddit posts were characterized using two sets of language features: (a) dictionary-based psycholinguistic features, and (b) open-vocabulary topics. ## results adolescent and adult mid users show considerable differences in the linguistic features and topics discussed in their reddit posts. ## discussion this study has three main findings. first, adolescents and adults with depression share several topic similarities with each other (21% of topics in the mid sample exhibited significant term overlap for the two age groups, while this was only 17% in the control sample). the shared topics revolved predominantly around family matters and negative emotions, aligning with previous research that depressed users tend to exhibit higher levels of sadness, anxiety, and anger in their online writings @xcite . this finding may suggest that depression has language markers that distinguish it from standard social media content, while also highlighting the universality of negative emotion and family challenges as markers of depression that transcend age groups. second, adolescents and adults with depression possess several distinct linguistic features of depression specific to their age group. adolescent social media users with depression were more likely to associate their condition with social relationships, using words relating to friendships more frequently than adults with depression. this finding remained significant when controlling for neurotypical users, indicating that the topic of social relationships may be uniquely correlative with depression for adolescents. in contrast, adults with depression were more likely to associate their condition with job responsibilities, financial status, and health, evident in the higher prevalence of terms related to money and physical health (i.e. exhaustion, sexual matters, and substances). this not only aligns with prior research that depressed adults display more somatic symptoms than younger individuals with depression @xcite , but also highlights how adults discuss their depression differently than adolescent users on social media. adolescent social media users with depression exhibited a higher usage of future-tense language when discussing their mental health experiences, suggesting a preoccupation with future stressors potentially correlative with the onset of depression. in contrast, adults with depression employed more past-tense language, indicating a focus on past grievances or regrets. this differs from prior research with neurotypical social media users, where as users increased in age, they used more futuretense @xcite , indicating that these temporal linguistic features may be unique to depression and can be age-specific language markers. third, the linguistic features that distinguish depression were more prominent and effective among adolescent social media users compared to adults. while adults with and without depression had several similarities in the topics they discussed (15% of topics had significant term overlap), the topics discussed by adolescents with and without depression had considerably less overlap (only 7%). this suggests that among older social media users, the correlative topics of depression may become less discernible and intertwined with normal discussion topics. prior research suggests that the reason for this discrepancy is because adults are less open to expression on social media compared to younger individuals @xcite ; other results from the present study also supports this finding, as adults were shown to use more impersonal and less emotional expression when discussing their depression compared to adolescent users. overall, this finding indicates that identifying depression expression on social media platforms may be more difficult within adult subpopulations compared to adolescent groups. ## limitations the present study had limitations that should be acknowledged. first, the infrequency of age selfdisclosure on reddit made it challenging to obtain samples for a wider range of age categories, such as individuals over the age of 60. this resulted in a dataset predominantly composed of users aged 13-40, as seen in figure 1 , necessitating a focus on binary age groups rather than narrower ranges. the age group of "adults" in the present study may be more advantageously interpreted as "young adults." further research is thus needed with a larger amount of age-labeled data for analysis of more precise age ranges. another limitation was the topic modeling process, where the interpretation of results relied on observation rather than a psychologist's expertise. this introduces potential bias, and the topics should therefore be validated by further research. future studies should also employ more rigorous linguistic models and methodologies for precise topic categorization. moreover, due to reddit's interactive forum structure, the posts analyzed in the present study may have belonged to larger chains/dialogues that influenced the user's behavior and language use. future studies should incorporate additional contextual information to avoid hidden confounding variables. finally, the sample of reddit users may not be representative of the global population, limiting the generalizability of our findings. the present study focused solely on reddit and the english language, while mental health discussions may occur on other platforms or in different languages. future research should consider incorporating data from multiple platforms and languages for a more comprehensive understanding. ## conclusion this exploratory study contributes to a growing body of literature on mental health expression in online language data by quantitatively examining age-based linguistic differences in expressing depression on reddit. by investigating social media data through psycholinguistic feature extraction and open-vocabulary topic modeling, adolescents and adults with depression were found to engage in discussions about several common topics; however, they also exhibited distinct age-specific linguistic markers, with adolescents being more prone to associating their depression with friendships, while adults were more likely to focus on work and health concerns. depression language markers were also found to be more discernible among adolescent social media users compared to adult users. these findings highlight the importance of recognizing language variations across age groups when detecting depression on social media.