Social Media Based Analysis of Opioid Epidemic Using Reddit.

ABSTRACT

Opioid-abuse epidemic in the United States has escalated to national attention due to the dramatic increase of opioid overdose deaths. Analyzing opioid-related social media has the potential to reveal patterns of opioid abuse at a national scale, understand opinions of the public, and provide insights to support prevention and treatment. Reddit is a community based social media with more reliable content curated by the community through voting. In this study, we collected and analyzed all opioid related discussions from January 2014 to October 2017, which contains 51,537 posts by 16,162 unique users. We analyzed the data to understand the psychological categories of the posts, and performed topic modeling to reveal the major topics of interest. We also characterized the extent of social support received from comments and scores by each post. Last, we analyzed statistically significant difference in the posts between anonymous and non-anonymous users.