  The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a severe mental strain on people in general,
and on young people in particular. Online support forums offer opportunities
for peer-to-peer health support, which can ease pressure on professional and
established volunteer services when demand is high. Such forums can also be
used to monitor at-risk communities to identify concerns and causes of
psychological stress. We created and monitored r/COVID19_support, an online
forum for people seeking support during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the platform
Reddit. We identify posts made by users self-identifying as students or posting
about college/university life, then coded these posts to identify emerging
themes that related to triggers of psychological anxiety and distress. 147
posts were made to the forum by 111 unique users during the study period. A
number of themes were identified by manual coding, included: feelings of grief
associated with the loss of college-related life experiences, such as
graduation ceremonies or proms; difficulties with focussing on online and
self-guided learning; and fears for the future, in particular of graduating
into a constrained job market. The identification of specific issues enabled
users to be signposted to information to help them cope with address those
particular concerns. Monitoring peer-to-peer forums can help to identify
specific issues with which vulnerable groups may require additional support,
enabling users to be signposted on to high-quality information to address
specific issues.
