Discussions of Antidepressant Side Effects and Withdrawal on Reddit

Antidepressant use or withdrawal can lead to side effects such as weight changes and sexual dysfunction. These effects, as well as depression and antidepressants themselves, are stigmatized topics. Reddit is a social media plat-form which encourages discussion of such stigmatized topics by providing semi-anonymity and therefore increasing self-disclosure. This study collects data from the subreddit r/depression and identifies potential antidepressant side effects, withdrawal effects, and symptoms of depression. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) is applied to the data set as an exploratory analysis. It is well-suited for this study because ENA focuses on relationships between themes in the text, and these relationships are key to untangling the potentially similar effects of depression, antidepressant use, and antidepressant withdrawal. The size and structure of this data set and others from social media pose both opportunities and challenges. This work provides an example of potential applications for tools such as ROCK, justifier and threaded ENA which are designed for use with social media data.