  In recent years, Online Social Networks have become an important medium for
people who suffer from mental disorders to share moments of hardship, and
receive emotional and informational support. In this work, we analyze how
discussions in Reddit communities related to mental disorders can help improve
the health conditions of their users. Using the emotional tone of users'
writing as a proxy for emotional state, we uncover relationships between user
interactions and state changes. First, we observe that authors of negative
posts often write rosier comments after engaging in discussions, indicating
that users' emotional state can improve due to social support. Second, we build
models based on SOTA text embedding techniques and RNNs to predict shifts in
emotional tone. This differs from most of related work, which focuses primarily
on detecting mental disorders from user activity. We demonstrate the
feasibility of accurately predicting the users' reactions to the interactions
experienced in these platforms, and present some examples which illustrate that
the models are correctly capturing the effects of comments on the author's
emotional tone. Our models hold promising implications for interventions to
provide support for people struggling with mental illnesses.
