April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: When We Talk about Opioids Overtly: Information Types of Opioid Discussion on Reddit
Research Objective Opioid abuse is declared a nationwide public health emergency in the U.S. since 2017 (HHS, 2021).Very few people with opioid use disorders will take treatment and even for those with treatment,they are easily back to the recurrence of addiction,known as “relapse” in health recovery (Madras et al., 2020).To better prevent opioid abuse,behavior markers before relapse are widely studied, among which linguistic features captured in discussion forums can predict relapse risks (Kornfield et al., 2018).The underlying assumption is that the language production process reflects our mental states when coping with challenges in daily life (Pennebaker, 1997).The relation between linguistic features and relapse risks may become salient during the COVID pandemic as life changes,being the situational stressors,may trigger substance use disorders and result in a flux of information seeking regarding opioid use.Any misleading or incorrect messages may stumble information seekers into opioid misuse, especially those in addiction recovery.Therefore, this study examined opioid -related messages exchanged on Reddit.com, a semi-anonymous community for open source, and aimed to investigate information types that may be harmful to online users.Results from this research can assist platform managers in strategy making to monitor concerning messages in time. Methods Data were collected from Reddit.com from January 2009 to August 2021.We generated a list of 21 opioid-related keywords and retrieved 1,261,702 messages exchanged through the Reddit API.To keep content focused, 104 subreddits - the user-created areas of interest within the Reddit platform - centering on medical information discussion were selected for analysis. Analytical Strategy We applied a hybrid approach combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model, social network analysis (SNA), and qualitative discourse analysis to the text. We also consider developing a machine learning algorithm for harmful content flagging at the later stage of this project. Preliminary Results The LDA found that there exist four themes mainly discussed with opioid mentions: specific drug use (e.g., urge, help, withdraw) (50.6%), cope relationship or relationship advice (25.7%), medical prescription (18.5%), and others (5.2%).Apart from subreddits with clear indications such as “r/Drugs”, “r/opiates”, and “r/Methadone”, some communities involved with opioid discussion are not self-explanatory.For example, mentions of opioid names emerged in the “r/relationship” subreddit when users shared their stories about dealing with family members and friends who have a history of relapse, rehab, and addiction treatment.Another subreddit “r/BabyBumps”, a forum for pregnant redditors, mentions opioid terms maybe because of the pain treatment for labor delivery. A “r/kratom” subreddit was heavily involved with the opioid topic discussion and caused confusing debates among users.One post wrote, “…I just feel like the addictiveness and withdrawal symptoms of kratom are a little exaggerated…” echoed by another poster “I can't … stand how some people think if you’re taking kratom you're not clean from opiates yet they swear someone is clean when on subs or methadone ...”.Further analysis will examine why this newly warned drug for its addiction risks received public criticism or misperception. Our study contributes to the growing research using social media as a public health surveillance tool for opioid epidemic management.