Title: Utilizing Social Media for Identifying Drug Addiction and Recovery Intervention

Co-authors: Janardan Misra, Saptarshi Ghosh, Sanjay Podder

Abstract:

Social media forums such as Reddit have become popular platforms for users discussing their mental health issues. The objective of our study is to utilize Reddit posts related to drug addiction and substance abuse, in order to help addicted persons who wish to recover from addiction. We collect posts from 100 Subreddits related to drug/substance addiction, and analyze these posts to understand differences in social media usage patterns among users in different stages of addiction/recovery. Based on the observed differences, we first develop an automated mechanism for inferring which stage of addiction/recovery a user is in, based on a Reddit post authored by the user. By annotating Reddit posts with the help of standard health psychology literature, we develop a Machine Learning classifier to classify the posts among different stages of addiction/recovery. Finally, we identify target users having intention to recover from their addiction, and perform personalized mentor recommendation by suggesting users who are already in their advanced stage of recovery from the same drugs as the target users. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to utilize social media for facilitating the process of recovery of users affected with drug/substance addiction.