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Suicide and Self-Injury

In Distinction and Overlap: Structural Topic Modeling and Clustering between r/selfharm and r/suicidewatch

(PS9-D77) In Distinction and Overlap: Structural Topic Modeling and Clustering Between R/selfharm and r/suicidewatch

Saturday, November 18, 2023

11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST

Location: Regency Ballroom, Level 7

Author(s)

Jung Woon Park, B.A.

Graduate Student in Clinical Psychology PhD
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, Indiana

Co-Author(s)

RJ

Ross Jacobucci, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana
TB

Theodore Beauchaine, Ph.D.

Clinical Psychology Professor
The University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and accounts for over 40,000 annual deaths in the U.S.. Developmentally, non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) often portends risk for future suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB). However, the mechanism explaining the association between NSSI and STB remains unclear. Social media platforms, such as Reddit, contain many references to NSSI (subreddit “r/selfharm”) and STB (subreddit “r/suicidewatch”), in text form. We conducted unigram topic modeling, aimed to assess the proportion a number of topics determined by Lee and Mimno (2014) in the documents, using unsupervised machine learning, to convert 2000 aggregate posts from both r/selfharm (n=1000) and r/suicidewatch (n=1000). Topic models is a statistical model used to identify networks of words (unigrams) that co-occur across the text and therefore each group representing abstract topics. We then applied hierarchical agglomerative clustering analysis, which starts from each object as its own cluster, then iteratively merges pairs of clusters based on marginal correlation for the topic proportions 𝛉 (distance) until all objects are clustered together. The combination of topic modeling and clustering yielded three clusters in r/selfharm and r/suicidewatch emerged, including characteristics of injury, emotional distress, and permanence of death. Both the injury cluster and permanence of death cluster were associated more with emotional distress than with each other. The results suggest, given the observed Reddit platform data, that the potentially shared cluster of topics in both NSSI and STB is emotional distress.