Stopping Antidepressants and Anxiolytics as Major Concerns Reported in Online Health Communities: A Text Mining Approach

Abstract

Background Internet is a particularly dynamic way to quickly capture the perceptions of a population in real time. Complementary to traditional face-to-face communication, online social networks help patients to improve self-esteem and self-help. Objective The aim of this study was to use text mining on material from an online forum exploring patients’ concerns about treatment (antidepressants and anxiolytics). Methods Concerns about treatment were collected from discussion titles in patients’ online community related to antidepressants and anxiolytics. To examine the content of these titles automatically, we used text mining methods, such as word frequency in a document-term matrix and co-occurrence of words using a network analysis. It was thus possible to identify topics discussed on the forum. Results The forum included 2415 discussions on antidepressants and anxiolytics over a period of 3 years. After a preprocessing step, the text mining algorithm identified the 99 most frequently occurring words in titles, among which were escitalopram, withdrawal, antidepressant, venlafaxine, paroxetine, and effect. Patients’ concerns were related to antidepressant withdrawal, the need to share experience about symptoms, effects, and questions on weight gain with some drugs. Conclusions Patients’ expression on the Internet is a potential additional resource in addressing patients’ concerns about treatment. Patient profiles are close to that of patients treated in psychiatry.