UGA study breaks down if Reddit self-help communities are an asset or an obstacle

ATHENS, Ga. — Note: If you or someone you know is thinking of harming themselves, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides free support via the Lifeline by dialing 988. For more about risk factors and warning signs, visit the organization’s official website.

In the online world that is the social media site Reddit, there’s a community for everyone.

While some communities on the site are focused on cat pictures, the latest video games or even megathreads discussing the latest episode from a Marvel show, others are focused on life changes and things like mental healthcare.

A new study by the University of Georgia examined how users that are part of the site’s self-harm, self-help community use it to get mental health help and support.

The study by UGA researchers focused on whether the communities are assets to users, who may need professional mental health care, or if they’re obstacles to stopping self-harming behaviors.

In their analysis, UGA said users go to the r/selfharm community on Reddit to share traumatic events and search for catharsis, while seeking support during difficult times.

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However, the researchers caution that the communities, called subreddits, aren’t able to give their users the same type of help and support that medical professionals can.

“We don’t know the accuracy of the information that’s being shared in these communities about nonsuicidal self-injury,” Amanda Giordano, lead author of the study and an associate professor in UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education, said. “A client engaging in self-harm may feel as though they have the support they need in their online community and, in turn, may not seek offline help.”

Giordano said some evidence suggests that the conversations with “anonymous strangers online” is less helpful than getting support from a trusted person offline instead.

The UGA study focused on a sample of 400 posts in the self-harm subreddit. While the sample was only a few hundred posts, the forum itself had 143,000 members in it at the time. Researchers said the community’s size “provided a window into the overall tone and attitude posters have toward self-injury.”

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One finding they saw was a shifting attitude toward non-suicidal self injury, or NSSI.

Giordano said users in the community were “engaging in self-harm as a way to stop bad feelings and feel better,” though others “framed self-harm as a problem rather than a solution.”

“Among posts that disclosed the motive for NSSI, emotion regulation was the most prevalent,” the study’s abstract says.

Still, the researchers said there were just as many posts expressing an intention to stop self-harming as there were those who said they had no intention of stopping.

“The majority of posts did not describe why the poster engaged in self-injury, but of those who did, the most common reason was for emotion regulation. They were engaging in self-harm as a way to stop bad feelings and feel better,” Giordano said.

Behaviorally, the study noted that users used addiction-related language when referring to self-injury and other self-harm-related activities, showing “that a substantial number of users view self-harm as an addiction.”

The study found “addiction language was present in 25.3% of posts,” while language related to suicide was only in about 8.5%.

UGA said 42% of the posts in the study showed the poster was currently engaged in self-harming activities, while just 20% were from users who were no longer injuring themselves.

The research team said counselors and mental health professionals are able to help their clients shift their perspectives, going from thinking of self-harm as a solution for managing their psychological pain to instead recognizing that self-injury doesn’t stop the issues causing their distress.

Instead, professionals can help those engaged in self-harm realize that it just adds additional risks.

“Then the work would be around increasing their motivation to change and to find alternative, more adaptive ways of regulating their emotions outside of self-harm,” Giordano said.

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