What People Say About Mental Health on Reddit

I built this to see what people actually talk about in online mental health communities. It's also the easiest project to check: the repository has the collection script, the raw and scored data, the model results and the dashboard.

I used the Reddit API to collect 6,398 posts and 19,488 comments from r/Anxiety, r/depression and r/mentalhealth, then scored every item with three sentiment methods: VADER, TextBlob and a HuggingFace transformer. I used three because lexicon-based tools and fine-tuned models often disagree on text this personal, and I wanted to see where.

Then I trained three classifiers on TF-IDF features. Logistic regression and the random forest tied at 91.25% accuracy (0.871 F1), and the linear SVM came in at 90.63% (0.868 F1). Those results are close enough that which model you pick matters less than what the labels actually capture.

The most interesting result came from the topic modeling. Most of the topics that came out weren't about mental health directly. They were about money, housing, politics and social media.