Reddit depression communities as spaces of emotion regulation: a data-informed analysis of coping and engagement

Online social platforms increasingly function as informal self-help environments for individuals experiencing depression, offering spaces for emotional expression and peer support outside traditional clinical settings. However, how coping strategies and psychological engagement states—individuals’ emotional and cognitive involvement in managing their condition—are reflected through online self-disclosure remains poorly understood. We analyzed a large-scale dataset from Reddit depression-related communities to investigate how different psycho-linguistic profiles and coping orientations emerge from users’ language. We collected posts and comments from over 300,000 users across six depression-focused subreddits over two years. User-generated text was characterized through multiple psychological and linguistic dimensions capturing emotions, sentiment, subjectivity, and related features, then aggregated at the user-month level and analyzed using unsupervised clustering techniques. Our analysis identifies four distinct groups characterized by different emotional profiles and dominant coping orientations. These states exhibit meaningful correspondences with established theoretical frameworks, including the Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced model and the Patient Health Engagement model. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale textual data from online communities can provide interpretable insights into coping behaviors and engagement patterns, offering a complementary perspective to traditional approaches for studying mental health.