Gender and Cross-Cultural Differences in Social Media Disclosures of Mental Illness

Cultural and gender norms shape how mental illness and therapy are perceived. However, there is a paucity of adequate empirical evidence around gender and cultural dimensions of mental illness. In this paper we situate social media as a "lens" to examine these dimensions. We focus on a large dataset of individuals who self-disclose to have an underlying mental health concern on Twitter. Having identified genuine disclosures in this data via semi-supervised learning, we examine differences in their posts, as measured via linguistic attributes and topic models. Our findings reveal significant differences between the content shared by female and male users, and by users from two western and two majority world countries. Males express higher negativity and lower desire for social support, whereas majority world users demonstrate more inhibition in their expression. We discuss the implications of our work in providing insights into the relationship of gender and culture with mental health, and in the design of gender and culture-aware health interventions.