Online support: investigating the role of public online forums in mental health

Part of Could online user-generated content revolutionise health services?

This report looks at the large amounts of mental health related discussion taking place on public online forums, and explores whether computational techniques can provide robust, actionable insight from these conversations. The report was written by the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Demos in partnership with The King’s Fund. It was funded by the Wellcome Trust

The report describes the collection and analysis of one million publicly available forum posts, collected from forums related to mental health. Furthermore, it addresses the technical and ethical challenges posed by the collection and analysis of online forum data.

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