# Cross-Cultural Differences in Mental Health Expressions on Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11477 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11477/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [A Survey on Multilingual Mental Disorders Detection from Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15556/) (2025)
- [Conceptors for Semantic Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04980/) (2026)
- [Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03247/) (2025)
- [Semantic Label Drift in Cross-Cultural Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25967/) (2025)
- [Assess and Prompt: A Generative RL Framework for Improving Engagement in Online Mental Health Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16788/) (2025)
- [Holistix: A Dataset for Holistic Wellness Dimensions Analysis in Mental Health Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09565/) (2025)
- [Whose Assessment of Distress? Community Perspectives and LLM Alignment on Well-Being Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29446/) (2026)
- [CultureMINE: Datasets and Methods for Improving the Cultural Capabilities of NLP Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22494/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Culture moderates the way individuals perceive and express mental distress. Current understandings of mental health expressions on social media, however, are predominantly derived from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) contexts. To address this gap, we examine mental health posts on Reddit made by individuals geolocated in India, to identify variations in social media language specific to the Indian context compared to users from Western nations. Our experiments reveal significant psychosocial variations in emotions and temporal orientation. This study demonstrates the potential of social media platforms for identifying cross-cultural differences in mental health expressions (e.g. seeking advice in India vs seeking support by Western users). Significant linguistic variations in online mental health-related language emphasize the importance of developing precision-targeted interventions that are culturally appropriate.