The Self-Help Literature on Self-Compassion and on Postpartum Depression: A Word Keyness and Collocation Study

This study examined postpartum depression and self-compassion self-help literature by analyzing a linguistic corpus created from postpartum depression and self-compassion self-help literature. A corpus linguist program called AntConc was used for quantitative text (Anthony, 2020) to analyze keyness and collocates of the key words found in self-compassion and postpartum depression self-help literature. Results of this study show the strongest positive key word was “compassion,” the strongest negative key word was “baby,” and the words “mantra,” “website,” and “lacked” were notably the strongest collocates with the node word self-compassion in the study corpus. The words “depression” and “stress” were the strongest collocations with the node word postpartum in the reference corpus.