Large-Scale Analysis of Online Questions Related to Opioid Use Disorder on Reddit

Abstract

Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a leading health problem that affects individual well-being as well as general public health. Due to a variety of reasons including stigma faced by people who use opioids, online communities for recovery and support were formed on different social media platforms. In these communities, people share their experiences and solicit information by asking questions to learn about opioid use and recovery. These communities however do not always contain clinically verified information. In this paper, we study natural language questions asked in the context of OUD-related discourse on Reddit. We adopt transformer-based question detection along with hierarchical clustering across 19 subreddits to identify six coarse-grained categories and 69 fine-grained categories of OUD-related questions. Our analysis uncovers ten areas of information-seeking from Reddit users in the context of OUD: drug sales, specific drug-related questions, OUD treatment, drug uses, side effects, withdrawal, lifestyle, drug testing, pain management and others, during the study period of 2018-2021. Our work provides a major step in improving the understanding of OUD-related questions people ask unobtrusively on Reddit. We finally discuss technological interventions and public health harm reduction techniques based on the topics of these questions.