  Recent research has established both a theoretical basis and strong empirical
evidence that effective social behavior plays a beneficial role in the
maintenance of physical and psychological well-being of people. To test whether
social behavior and well-being are also associated in online communities, we
studied the correlations between the recovery of patients with mental disorders
and their behaviors in online social media. As the source of the data related
to the social behavior and progress of mental recovery, we used PatientsLikeMe
(PLM), the world's first open-participation research platform for the
development of patient-centered health outcome measures. We first constructed
an online social network structure based on patient-to-patient ties among 200
patients obtained from PLM. We then characterized patients' online social
activities by measuring the numbers of "posts and views" and "helpful marks"
each patient obtained. The patients' recovery data were obtained from their
self-reported status information that was also available on PLM. We found that
some node properties (in-degree, eigenvector centrality and PageRank) and the
two online social activity measures were significantly correlated with
patients' recovery. Furthermore, we re-collected the patients' recovery data
two months after the first data collection. We found significant correlations
between the patients' social behaviors and the second recovery data, which were
collected two months apart. Our results indicated that social interactions in
online communities such as PLM were significantly associated with the current
and future recoveries of patients with mental disorders.
