Bursts of Activity: Temporal Patterns of Help-Seeking and Support in Online Mental Health Forums

Recent years have seen a rise in social media platforms that provide peer-to-peer support to individuals suffering from mental distress. Studies on the impact of these platforms have focused on either short-term scales of single-post threads, or long-term changes over arbitrary period of time (months or years). While important, such arbitrary periods do not necessarily follow users' progressions through acute periods of distress. Using data from Talklife, a mental health platform, we find that user activity follows a distinct pattern of high activity periods with interleaving periods of no activity, and propose a method for identifying such bursts and breaks in activity. We then show how studying activity during bursts can provide a personalized, medium-term analysis for a key question in online mental health communities: What characteristics of user activity lead some users to find support and help, while others fall short? Using two independent outcome metrics, moments of cognitive change and self-reported changes in mood during a burst of activity, we identify two actionable features that can improve outcomes for users: persistence within bursts, and giving complex emotional support to others. Our results demonstrate the value of considering bursts as a natural unit of analysis for psychosocial change in online mental health communities.