Does Usage of Online Social Media Help Users With Depressed Symptoms Improve Their Mental Health? Empirical Evidence From an Online Depression Community

Online depression communities offer people with depressed symptoms new opportunities to obtain health information and provide social support for each other to fight against the depression. We sought to investigate whether usage of online community help improve depression outcomes and determine which types of usage behaviors have positive or negative effects on depression. We proposed that two dimensions of the sense of belonging (sense of identity and trust) and three dimensions of the sense of support (informational, emotional, and socializing) have significant effects on depression, and further considered gender difference and its effect on depression. We obtained a dataset consisting of 465,337 posts from 244 members from a popular online depression community to test all 10 proposed hypotheses. The results reveal that (i) the sense of shared identity, trust, informational support, and emotional support have positive effects on depression, while socializing support have negative effects on depression, and (ii) the sense of shared identity and trust have more positive effects on depression for female users than male users while socializing support has a more negative effect on depression for female users than for male users. The findings have important practical implications for designers and managers of online depression communities.