  The United States is currently experiencing an unprecedented opioid crisis,
and opioid overdose has become a leading cause of injury and death. Effective
opioid addiction recovery calls for not only medical treatments, but also
behavioral interventions for impacted individuals. In this paper, we study
communication and behavior patterns of patients with opioid use disorder (OUD)
from social media, intending to demonstrate how existing information from
common activities, such as online social networking, might lead to better
prediction, evaluation, and ultimately prevention of relapses. Through a
multi-disciplinary and advanced novel analytic perspective, we characterize
opioid addiction behavior patterns by analyzing opioid groups from Reddit.com -
including modeling online discussion topics, analyzing text co-occurrence and
correlations, and identifying emotional states of people with OUD. These
quantitative analyses are of practical importance and demonstrate innovative
ways to use information from online social media, to create technology that can
assist in relapse prevention.
