Társadalmi Innovációs Nemzeti Laboratórium(TINLAB)
Online depression forums are emerging platforms of the e-mental health sector. Exploring
the ongoing lay discourses has the potential of better understanding first-person
accounts of depression and developing new technologies of health promotion. Based
on these premises, the article analyzes the hypothesis concerning the discursive transformation
of sadness into depression (elaborated by Horwitz and Wakefield), that is the ‘medicalization’
and ‘psychologization’ of social suffering. While these generic theoretical diagnoses
describe a long-term discursive transformation, they rely on a limited methodological
toolset as they are based on the retrospective examination of key discursive sources
(such as the consequent generations of DSM). While these analyses certainly have a
heuristic value, their conclusions require further empirical testing. Our analysis
focuses on the largest English-language online depression forums, while relying on
word-embedding modelling. Our results do not simply reinforce or falsify the original
hypotheses; instead, they imply a more complex model: on manifest level, the medicalization
or psychologization of social suffering is detectable only partially; however, on
a latent level, many of these solutions still follow either an instrumental-medical
or a supportive-psychological logic. Based on these results, the reinforcement of
online forums hosting social suffering discourses of depression is suggested.
