ArticleMedical humanities2022
Digital hermeneutics: scaled readings of online depression discourses.
Article in Medical humanities, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 1 paper, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A Systematic Review of the Use of Blogs and Vlogs as Self-Expressors for People with Serious and Common Mental Illness.The Psychiatric quarterly · 2026Pooled it
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issuedCorrection:2023
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When it comes to understanding experiences of illness, humanities and social sciences research have traditionally reserved a prominent role for narrative. Yet, depression has characteristics that withstand the form of traditional narratives, such as a lack of desire and an impotence to act. How can a 'datafied' approach to online forms of depression writing pose a valuable addition to existing narrative approaches in health humanities? In this article, we analyse lay people's depression discourses online. Our approach, 'digital hermeneutics', is inspired by Gadamer's dialogical hermeneutics. It consists of a 'scaled reading' on five different scales: platform hermeneutics; contextual reading with term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF); distant reading with natural language processing topic modelling; hyper-reading with concordance views and close reading. Our corpus consisted of three data sets, from the blogs and message boards of, respectively, time-to-change.org.uk, a UK-based social organisation and movement that aims to counter mental health discrimination and alleviate social isolation by spreading awareness; Sane.org.uk, a leading UK mental health charity that seeks to help people in facing the challenges of mental illness and to improve quality of life; and the subreddit 'r/depression' on web discussion platform reddit. We found that the manner in which people express experiences of illness online is very much dependent on the specific affordances of platforms. We found degrees of 'narrativity' to be correlated to authorship and identity markers: the less 'anonymous' the writing, generally speaking, the more conventionally 'narrative' it was. Pseudonimity was related to more intimate and singular forms, with less pressure to conform to socially accepted and positive narratives of the 'restitution' type. We also found that interactive affordances of the platforms were used to a limited extent, nuancing assumptions about the polyvocality of online depression writing. We conclude by making a claim for increased cooperation between digital and medical humanities that might lead to a field of 'Digital Medical Humanities'.
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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.