Department of Communication, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States.
JMIR Public Health Surveill. 2021 Aug 17;7(8):e29029. doi: 10.2196/29029.
Widespread fear surrounding COVID-19, coupled with physical and social distancing orders, has caused severe adverse mental health outcomes. Little is known, however, about how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted LGBTQ+ youth, who disproportionately experienced a high rate of adverse mental health outcomes before the COVID-19 pandemic.
We aimed to address this knowledge gap by harnessing natural language processing methodologies to investigate the evolution of conversation topics in the most popular subreddit for LGBTQ+ youth.
We generated a data set of all r/LGBTeens subreddit posts (n=39,389) between January 1, 2020 and February 1, 2021 and analyzed meaningful trends in anxiety, anger, and sadness in the posts. Because the distribution of anxiety before widespread social distancing orders was meaningfully different from the distribution after (P<.001), we employed latent Dirichlet allocation to examine topics that provoked this shift in anxiety.
We did not find any differences in LGBTQ+ youth anger and sadness before and after government-mandated social distancing; however, anxiety increased significantly (P<.001). Further analysis revealed a list of 10 anxiety-provoking topics discussed during the pandemic: attraction to a friend, coming out, coming out to family, discrimination, education, exploring sexuality, gender pronouns, love and relationship advice, starting a new relationship, and struggling with mental health.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, LGBTQ+ teens increased their reliance on anonymous discussion forums when discussing anxiety-provoking topics. LGBTQ+ teens likely perceived anonymous forums as safe spaces for discussing lifestyle stressors during COVID-19 disruptions (eg, school closures). The list of prevalent anxiety-provoking topics in LGBTQ+ teens' anonymous discussions can inform future mental health interventions in LGBTQ+ youth.
对 COVID-19 的广泛恐惧，加上身体和社会距离命令，导致了严重的不良心理健康后果。然而，人们对 COVID-19 危机如何影响 LGBTQ+ 青年知之甚少，他们在 COVID-19 大流行之前经历了不成比例的高不良心理健康后果。
我们旨在通过利用自然语言处理方法来解决这一知识空白，以调查在最受欢迎的 LGBTQ+青年子论坛上的对话主题的演变。
我们生成了一个 r/LGBTeens 子论坛帖子的数据集（n=39389），时间范围为 2020 年 1 月 1 日至 2021 年 2 月 1 日，并分析了帖子中焦虑、愤怒和悲伤的有意义趋势。因为在广泛的社会隔离命令之前，焦虑的分布与之后的分布有明显的不同（P<.001），我们采用潜在狄利克雷分配来检查引起这种焦虑变化的主题。
在政府强制社会隔离前后，我们没有发现 LGBTQ+青年的愤怒和悲伤有任何差异；然而，焦虑显著增加（P<.001）。进一步的分析揭示了在大流行期间讨论的 10 个引起焦虑的话题：对朋友的吸引力、出柜、向家人出柜、歧视、教育、探索性取向、性别代词、爱和关系建议、开始新关系和与心理健康作斗争。
在 COVID-19 大流行期间，LGBTQ+青少年在讨论引起焦虑的话题时，增加了对匿名讨论论坛的依赖。LGBTQ+青少年可能将匿名论坛视为在 COVID-19 干扰期间（例如学校关闭）讨论生活方式压力源的安全空间。在 LGBTQ+青少年匿名讨论中普遍存在的引起焦虑的话题清单，可以为未来 LGBTQ+青年的心理健康干预提供信息。
