Mental Health Support and its Relationship to Linguistic Accommodation in Online Communities

Abstract

Many online communities cater to the critical and unmet needs of individuals challenged with mental illnesses. Generally, communities engender characteristic linguistic practices, known as norms. Conformance to these norms, or linguistic accommodation, encourages social approval and acceptance. This paper investigates whether linguistic accommodation impacts a specific social feedback: the support received by an individual in an online mental health community. We first quantitatively derive two measures for each post in these communities: 1) the linguistic accommodation it exhibits, and 2) the level of support it receives. Thereafter, we build a statistical framework to examine the relationship between these measures. Although the extent to which accommodation is associated with support varies, we find a positive link between the two, consistent across 55 Reddit communities serving various psychological needs. We discuss how our work surfaces a tension in the functioning of these sensitive communities, and present design implications for improving their support provisioning mechanisms.