NORTH CENTRAL Overcoming Opioids: Analyzing, Characterizing, And Quantifying the Sentiment of Reddit Posts’ Tone and Language Prior to a Relapse to Allow for Early Intervention

Overview

Sixteen million people worldwide have suffered from opioid use disorder (OUD). Many of those affected by OUD turn to social media, particularly Reddit (a popular online-based post forum) as a means to aid them in their journey to recovery. The purpose of this study is to characterize how an individual’s vocabulary and tone changes in their Reddit posts as they move towards an opioid addiction relapse. The long-term application of the project is to evaluate if a potential opioid addiction relapse can be prevented by recognizing warning signs in Reddit conversations by identifying a pattern in user’s posts. The first step involved identifying Reddit users who had self-disclosed a relapse in the subreddit r/ OpiatesRecovery. This was done by building three language matching systems, known as regular expressions, which considered language differences between people and accounted for multiple variations of the same phrase. The regular expression with the highest occurrence was a form of the phrase, “Xdays clean”, appearing 806 times in 16,432 posts retrieved from Reddit’s public API from 2012-2021. 10% of users on this subreddit, originally meant for recovery, self-disclosed that they relapsed. On average, users who divulged their relapse went on to discuss it in 39% of their overall posts. 36% had their first post on the subreddit discuss a prior relapse. This research demonstrates a promising effort in developing automated identification of recovery problems that could allow professionals to efficiently engage with users who are struggling, and provide them with timely and accurate support.

Competition history

• JSHS 2022 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.