Online peer support mental health forums provide an effective and accessible form of support, augmenting scarce clinical and face-to-face assistance. However, to enhance their effectiveness, it is essential to understand the unique characteristics of peer support user groups, and how they participate, contribute and communicate in these forums. This paper proposes and tests a novel approach that leverages stylometry analysis to uncover the unique characteristics of peer support user groups in such forums.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Resilience is an accepted strengths-based concept that responds to change, adversity, and crises. This concept underpins both personal and community-based preventive approaches to mental health issues and shapes digital interventions. Online mental health peer-support forums have played a prominent role in enhancing resilience by providing accessible places for sharing lived experiences of mental issues and finding support.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Little is understood about the determinants of symptom expression in individuals with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). While individuals with FMS often report environmental influences, including weather events, on their symptom severity, a consistent effect of specific weather conditions on FMS symptoms has yet to be demonstrated. Content analysis of a large number of messages by individuals with FMS on Twitter can provide valuable insights into variation in the fibromyalgia experience from a first-person perspective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRetrieval is a key phase in case-based reasoning (CBR), since it lays the foundation for the overall effectiveness of CBR systems. Its aim is to retrieve useful cases that can be used to solve the target problem. To perform the retrieval process, CBR systems typically exploit similarity knowledge and is called similarity-based retrieval (SBR).
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