”I’m always in so much pain and no one will understand” - Detecting Patterns in Suicidal Ideation on Reddit

Social media has become another venue for those struggling with thoughts of suicide. Many turn to social media to express suicidal ideation and look for peer support. In our study we seek to better understand patterns in the behaviors of these users particularly on the social media platform Reddit. This study will explore how Reddit users move or progress between subreddits until they express active suicidal ideation. We also look at these users’ posting pattern in the time leading up to expressing suicidal ideation and the time after. We examined a large dataset of posts from users who created at least one thread on SuicideWatch during January 2019 - August 2019 and collected their posts starting in July 2018 to create a look back period of 6 months. This generated a total of 5,892,310 posts. We defined what it means to progress between subreddits and generated a graph of progressions of all users in our dataset. We found that these users mostly progressed to or from 8 different subreddits and each of these subreddits could point to a particular emotional difficulty that a user was having such as self harm or relationship problems. Furthermore, we examined the volume of posts and the proportion of posts with negative sentiment leading up to the first incident of active suicidal ideation and found that there is an increase in both negative sentiment and volume of posts leading up to the day of the first incident of suicidal ideation on Reddit. However, during the day of first incident of suicidal ideation, there is a precipitous drop in the number of posts which goes back up on the following day. Using this insight, we can better understand these users. This will allow for developing intervention for suicide prevention in social media platforms in the future.