Identifying Factors that Affect Filipino’s Mental Health using Topic Modelling and Keyword Extraction in r/mentalhealthph Subreddit.
by Hilbert Lazatin, Claudine Licong, and Matthew Romero
As mental health encompasses psychological, mental, and emotional well-being, it is imperative that an individual has an optimum mental state. In this time of the pandemic, however, worsening mental health has been observed. In this study, we aim to identify several factors that affect Filipinos’ mental health during the quarantine. To do this, posts from the r/mentalhealthph forum in Reddit were scraped and afterward cleaned through text normalization and lemmatization. A topic model was then computed for all posts in the r/mentalhealthph forum in Reddit using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. A model containing 5 topics was selected based on the topic coherence metric, which intuitively, relates to the prevalent mental health issues in the Philippines. The posts were then segmented per topic, and keyword extraction using the TextRank algorithm was performed for the segmented posts to identify potential factors that affect the mental health issues identified from topic modeling. The 5 topics identified from LDA are ADHD, Depression, Anxiety, Seeking Help, and Online Therapy. Among the five topics identified, ADHD was the most common as 52% of the posts were found to belong to such a topic. This is concerning given the 4.1% increase in the number of children with ADHD from 1997 to 2015. We also observed that the number of posts, regardless of the topic, doubled when the nationwide enhanced community quarantine was imposed, which shows the impact of the COVID-19 on the mental health of Filipinos. Our keyword extraction using TextRank also revealed a few potential factors that affect mental health issues. For example, we observed that ”work” is commonly ranked as an important word for depression and anxiety-related posts, which suggests that Filipinos are suffering from burnout in the workplace. This in fact agrees with a study that shows Manila, Philippines as 5th worldwide in terms of burnout rate. We also identified words such as ”parents”, ”family” and ”money” as important words for depression related posts. This may imply that family problems and poverty are triggers of depression for Filipinos. Lastly, the results from keyword extraction emphasize the importance of family and friends in the battle against mental health problems. For future studies, we propose to explore other methods that leverage semantic relationships between words, in extracting factors that affect mental health issues. Additionally, we can translate Filipino posts to English to preserve other useful information. Lastly, other online forums related to mental health can be explored to gather more data.