Substance Use
Tracking spatiotemporal trends in the public stigmatization of opioid use on social media Anna Nguyen* Anna Nguyen Shashanka Subrahmanya Russ Altman Johannes Eichstaedt Mathew Kiang
Background: Stigma around opioid use is a fundamental hinderance to effectively addressing the US opioid overdose crisis. Public stigma affects community support for local public health responses, such as safe injection sites or syringe exchange programs. However, surveying public opinion in real-time is difficult. Here, we applied natural language processing techniques to social media data to gain insight into the evolving dynamics of stigma and public perceptions about opioid use.
Methods: We queried posts made after January 1, 2015 from the r/SanFrancisco, r/Philadelphia, r/Chicago, and r/Atlanta subreddits that contained at least one mention of opioids or overdose. We estimated sentiment in these conversations over time using the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Emotion Lexicon. We modeled 100 topics across all forums using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and estimated their frequencies over time using locally estimated scatterplot smoothing (LOESS).
Results: We extracted 833 posts and 27,309 comments across all forums. Opioid-related posts were most prevalent between 2017-19 in r/Philadelphia, while in r/SanFrancisco there have been more recent increases in 2022 and 2023. Topics around harm reduction, policing, and mental health emerged from the combined text, with distinct regional trends in topic frequency and sentiment. Notably, discussions around safe injection sites were consistent over time in r/Atlanta, gradually increased in r/Chicago, peaked between 2020-21 in r/SanFrancisco, and spiked in 2022-23 in r/Philadelphia. Positive sentiment around safe injection sites was highest in r/Atlanta, but increased over time in r/Chicago.
Conclusions: Language analyses provided insights on the evolving stigmatization of opioid use, revealing complex spatiotemporal patterns in prevalent topics and the sentiments surrounding them. This work can be used to guide targeted interventions and communication strategies as the opioid overdose epidemic continues to evolve.
