Reshaping of Mental Health Discourse on Reddit: The Rise of Neurodivergence

Abstract

Public discourse about mental health is changing rapidly, and these changes are increasingly playing out online. Previous research has explored how specific mental health conditions are represented on social media, but little is known about representations of the wider mental health domain or how these representations have evolved over time. Analyzing posts and comments from 14 mental health subreddits (2015–2022), we characterize shifts in affinities among subreddits based on language and user activity. We also examine whether changes in mental health discourse reflect changes in attention (salience) to different conditions. Reddit mental health discourse was substantially reshaped over the study period, with autism and ADHD becoming more central within the network. Moreover, rises in a condition's centrality within the network were associated with increases in its salience. Our findings indicate that public understandings may be changing not only for individual conditions but also in how mental health and disorder are understood more broadly. These shifts may be contributing to discrepancies between public and professional understandings of mental health problems and have implications for help-seeking behaviors, overdiagnosis, and misdiagnosis. As public attention to mental health grows, understanding these dynamics is becoming increasingly important.