ArticleFrontiers in public health2020
Does Usage of Online Social Media Help Users With Depressed Symptoms Improve Their Mental Health? Empirical Evidence From an Online Depression Community.
Article in Frontiers in public health, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Depression classification based on automatic ontology generation and natural language processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Crying in the algorithm: modeling academic stress via multilayer topic construction and ERA effect.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Exploring self-presentation posts of people with depression: themes, stigma, and identity construction.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Online Depression Communities as a Complementary Approach to Improving the Attitudes of Patients With Depression Toward Medication Adherence: Cross-Sectional Survey Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- The influence of media use degree on public depressive symptoms: mediating role of big five personality.BMC psychiatry · 2023Article
- How Do Team-Level and Individual-Level Linguistic Styles Affect Patients' Emotional Well-Being-Evidence from Online Doctor Teams.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Internet addiction and its association with quality of life in patients with major depressive disorder: a network perspective.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- Determining Factors Affecting the Users' Participation of Online Health Communities: An Integrated Framework of Social Capital and Social Support.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Motivation Research on the Content Creation Behaviour of Young Adults in Anxiety Disorder Online Communities.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Why Do Users of Online Mental Health Communities Get Likes and Reposts: A Combination of Text Mining and Empirical Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- "No man is an island": How Chinese netizens use deliberate metaphors to provide "depression sufferers" with social support.Digital healthArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Online depression communities offer people with depressed symptoms new opportunities to obtain health information and provide social support for each other to fight against the depression. We sought to investigate whether usage of online community help improve depression outcomes and determine which types of usage behaviors have positive or negative effects on depression. We proposed that two dimensions of the sense of belonging (sense of identity and trust) and three dimensions of the sense of support (informational, emotional, and socializing) have significant effects on depression, and further considered gender difference and its effect on depression. We obtained a dataset consisting of 465,337 posts from 244 members from a popular online depression community to test all 10 proposed hypotheses. The results reveal that (i) the sense of shared identity, trust, informational support, and emotional support have positive effects on depression, while socializing support have negative effects on depression, and (ii) the sense of shared identity and trust have more positive effects on depression for female users than male users while socializing support has a more negative effect on depression for female users than for male users. The findings have important practical implications for designers and managers of online depression communities.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.