  COVID-19 pandemic has adversely and disproportionately impacted people
suffering from mental health issues and substance use problems. This has been
exacerbated by social isolation during the pandemic and the social stigma
associated with mental health and substance use disorders, making people
reluctant to share their struggles and seek help. Due to the anonymity and
privacy they provide, social media emerged as a convenient medium for people to
share their experiences about their day to day struggles. Reddit is a
well-recognized social media platform that provides focused and structured
forums called subreddits, that users subscribe to and discuss their experiences
with others. Temporal assessment of the topical correlation between social
media postings about mental health/substance use and postings about Coronavirus
is crucial to better understand public sentiment on the pandemic and its
evolving impact, especially related to vulnerable populations. In this study,
we conduct a longitudinal topical analysis of postings between subreddits
r/depression, r/Anxiety, r/SuicideWatch, and r/Coronavirus, and postings
between subreddits r/opiates, r/OpiatesRecovery, r/addiction, and r/Coronavirus
from January 2020 - October 2020. Our results show a high topical correlation
between postings in r/depression and r/Coronavirus in September 2020. Further,
the topical correlation between postings on substance use disorders and
Coronavirus fluctuates, showing the highest correlation in August 2020. By
monitoring these trends from platforms such as Reddit, epidemiologists, and
mental health professionals can gain insights into the challenges faced by
communities for targeted interventions.
