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Background This study examines the discourse of self-love, alcohol and other drugs (AOD) recovery, and mental health issues on social media. Self-love components like positive self-view (self-acceptance, self-compassion, and self-respect) and taking responsibility for oneself are associated with well-being and play a role in AOD recovery and various psychopathologies (e.g., depression and anxiety). These mental health issues can pose unique challenges to and often co-occur with AOD recovery; interestingly, these topics are often discussed alongside self-love on social media (e.g. Twitter and Instagram). Objective This paper aims to investigate the role of self-love in AOD recovery and other psychopathological issues. The purpose hereby is to identify concepts that could potentially aid recovery and understand language used on social media to inform how people disclose experiences about mental health and self-love. Methods Posts were coded on social media by using an already established #selflove codebook. An original sample of 188,114 posts was used as a basis of which two subsamples were created for the current study (N=1804; a) 902 #selflove and AOD recovery and b) a comparative matched 902 #selflove posts) for categories encompassing self-love, AOD recovery and other mental health issues. Results Results of a Chi-square analysis indicated a statistically significant relationship between mentions of mental health issues and AOD recovery within a self-love context (χ 2 (1, N=1804) = 61.97, p <.001), with 21.84% of all posts mentioning both topics. Two logistic regression models - one within an AOD-recovery/self-love context and one within a general self-love context (i.e., non-AOD recovery specific) - were performed to identify an association between mentions of positive self-views and responsibility-taking and their influence on mentions of mental health issues. The analysis revealed a statistically significant relationship only in an AOD-recovery/self-love context (χ 2 (2, n=902) = 10.90, p = .004). Here, the odds of mental health issues being mentioned were 63.9% higher when positive self-views were mentioned and 48.8% higher when taking responsibility was mentioned. Conclusions Implications of these findings are that, first, mental health issues and AOD recovery are related themes in a self-love context, demonstrating a shared language between these topics, which may be helpful for practitioners, the recovery community and researchers. Second, the study provides insight into how AOD recovery and mental health issues are discussed by people affected, including frequent topics as well as commonly used language. Third, findings indicate that self-love concepts of responsibility-taking and positive self-views could potentially be protective factors for mental health issues alongside AOD recovery. This implies the potential for utilizing self-love principles to inform treatment options for people struggling with mental health while recovering from AOD. However, more research is needed to identify the role self-love can play in treatment and to better understand language usage that is beneficial for treatment.
Röber et al. (Mon,) studied this question.