Cornell Subreddit: A Glimpse Into the Mental Health Climate on Campus
Joliet Stallone, Shirley Lo, Alexis Petterson
TW: This essay contains discussion of mental health and mentions of suicide.
Cornell University has long been regarded as one of the most “stressed-out” universities in the country, and it is well-known throughout campus that the university harbors a widespread mental health problem. The high levels of stress that students face are exacerbated by an extremely competitive and isolated campus environment which has undoubtedly, like most universities in America, worsened as a result of Covid-19. The Washington Post cites that “evidence shows college students experienced higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation in 2020 than in 2019.” Covid-19 severely disrupted the stability of social support networks and mental health resources throughout college campuses, and in an effort to understand the current mental health climate and impact of Covid-19 on Cornell’s campus, we chose to explore Reddit posts on the Cornell subreddit that mention words relevant to mental health.
We personally created this dataset, starting with selecting salient mental-health related words to search for within the Cornell subreddit. The words we focused on are: “mental health”, “depression”, “depressed”, “sad”, “stress”, and “stressed”. We further refined our search by limiting included posts to only those with upvote scores greater than 10, resulting in the 184 Reddit posts that comprise our dataset. Our dataset includes information on the score, title, author, selftext, upvote ratio, and the date of submission. We have arranged our data according to posts with the highest score and proceed in a descending order.
Given that mental health is a private and sensitive subject and Reddit is utilized as a safe, anonymous space to share personal narratives, one significant ethical consideration of using this data is preserving the users’ privacy. We have chosen to sort our dataset by highest score because we believe this signifies that the post has been sufficiently exposed to the public Cornell subreddit community of 32,800 members which reduces the concern we have of highlighting an extremely private and personal submission. Additionally, we have elected to paraphrase posts that contain potentially personally revealing information.
Furthermore, another consideration that must be taken into account is the generalizability of our conclusions to a sample that extends beyond the Cornell campus and even beyond subreddit users. The population of people that use Reddit skews to be 67% male while the population of Cornell is only 46% male. This could mean that the female voice of Cornell is missing from our data. It is also a stereotype that people on Reddit are predominantly STEM and computer science oriented, which is not fully indicative of the complete population of Cornell.
Even with this limitation in mind, we feel that our conclusions are representative of the Cornell community because of the large number of users that are active on the subreddit: the 32,800 active members actually doubles current Cornell student enrollment. There is also little evidence to suggest that the subpopulation of people that are posting in the Cornell subreddit would be significantly different from the Cornell population as a whole in the specific topic of mental health that we are investigating. Instead, we propose that the subreddit has been used as a safe haven for people at Cornell who are dealing with depression and mental health issues to vent about their emotions and find people who feel the same way.
In order to do this, we used an Application Programming Interface (API), which is used to help extract data from websites, in order to grab data from the Cornell subreddit and highlight the specified keywords that we wanted to focus on. Then, we used Pandas, a Python library for CSV files, to generate an aggregated data frame that became the basis for the rest of our computational analyses. Since we were curious about the most popular topics in the subreddit related to depression and mental health, we used the computational method of topic modeling. Our dataset has 184 posts, so topic modeling was the best option to narrow our interests down to only the most relevant themes. To utilize this method, we used MALLET, which read through all the Reddit posts and generated ten word clusters that seemed related to each other. We then labeled each word grouping with a descriptive title to better understand what MALLET believes are relevant topics and makes them comprehensible to a human audience.
To further investigate the mental health landscape in the Cornell subreddit, we used Pandas to produce a graph that displayed the years, months, and time of day that people posted about depression and mental health the most. We thought that it would be valuable to utilize Pandas to help visualize the timeline of when people posted because it could exhibit a particular time when people felt their mental health was the worst.
In the first graph, we zoom out and look at the number of posts each year, which shows that 2019 had the greatest number of posts related to depression and mental health with over 50 posts, and 2018 closely followed that. The data for 2021 is not complete, so the number of posts is expected to increase as the year continues. Furthermore, it is important to note that the rise in posts from 2017–2019 could be due to an increase in use of the Cornell subreddit as well; there could have been an overall surge in Reddit posts those years as people discovered this forum, which also resulted in more posts about depression and mental health.
In the second graph, we looked at the number of posts per month to see if there was a correlation between a specific time in the academic year and number of posts. We had hypothesized that there would be a sharp rise in the number of posts during stressful times, like prelim and finals season as well as the first month of the semester. With this graph, most of our predictions were correct. As seen above, April and May had the highest number of posts (~25 posts), which correlates with the second round of spring semester prelims and finals season. Furthermore, September is the first month of the academic year, so students could be stressed with new classes and feeling overwhelmed, turning to Reddit to vent to others about their struggles.
The final graph exhibits the relationship between time of day and number of posts about mental health. From this data, we see that people are more likely to post on the Cornell subreddit about this topic at late hours of the night from 9PM-11PM. Since these late hours are probably the only time that students have to themselves, it makes sense that they take this time to reflect and post about their struggles.
We then employed topic modeling to gain a better understanding of the specific subjects that the mental health-related Cornell subreddit posts pertained to and words that were frequently used within these topics. From the provided words, we deduced the following nine topic titles: Interpersonal Relationships, Cornell Mental Health Resources, Social Media, Covid, Social Isolation, Greek Life, Self-Confidence, Academics, Depression, and Overwhelmed.
From these topics, it is evident that most anxiety and stress inducing aspects at Cornell relate to social relationships, like having access to a stable support network or lack thereof, mental and physical health, and rigorous academics. Additionally, throughout the topics featured below, there are frequent mentions of both “home,” “parents,” “school,” and “friends,” which may shed some light on how Covid-19 has altered the balance of students’ home and school lives and resulted in added stressors on both sides. Further, specifically looking at the Covid topic, we are able to see the multifaceted nature of the problem by the variety of words contained in the topic, such as financial, health, housing, aid, and testing. Not only did Covid-19 serve as an immense stressor due to its dangerous health impacts, but it also caused severe financial disruption to many students and families which was further exacerbated by Cornell’s extreme delay in releasing crucial financial aid.
Below, we have included example submissions from the Cornell subreddit.
These examples highlight the type of academic stress many students at Cornell face, whether due to classes, a heavy workload, achievements, or post-graduate plans. The submissions also exemplify how members of the Cornell subreddit use the forum as an interactive community to find support.
In this case, the above examples focus on interpersonal relationships and isolation, especially in relation to Greek life and the difficult transition from high school to Cornell. While we were exploring submissions within this topic, we found a lot of similar narratives that described feeling alone without a strong support network to lean on. What is valuable about utilizing the Cornell subreddit for this expression is that it quickly becomes very clear that nobody is alone in feeling this way — there are hundreds of other students who have made posts that share similar feelings. While it may be difficult to navigate interpersonal relationships on campus, Reddit provides a comfortable space to foster valuable connections on a virtual platform.
A possible direction for future work in this realm is to extrapolate this data analysis mechanism to other universities to better understand what aspects of campus and social culture are contributing to a mental health crisis and provide this information to university mental health resource groups and clinics. Reddit provides important insight into the campus mental health climate through students’ personal narratives which is a valuable tool that usually isn’t readily available to healthcare professionals, as students may feel more comfortable sharing their experiences in an anonymous forum than directly to an individual. Equipped with a better understanding of the contextual and personal factors that contribute to a mental health crisis, healthcare providers, such as Cornell Health, can utilize more effective approaches in order to provide better support to struggling students. Professors can also gain an understanding of the academic and workload stress that students face and utilize this access to students’ personal experiences to facilitate a better work-life balance within their classrooms.
