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What do patients learn about psychotropic medications on the web? A natural language processing study
Kamber L Hart1, Roy H Perlis1, Thomas H McCoy1
1Center for Quantitative Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, 185 Cambridge Street, 6th Floor, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
Online information about psychiatric medications varies in sentiment. Some antidepressants and antipsychotics show more negative sentiment, while lithium and valproate appear less negative, impacting patient adherence.
Area of Science:
- Psychiatry
- Computational Linguistics
- Health Communication
Background:
- Medication adherence is a significant challenge in psychiatric care.
- Patient concerns regarding safety and adverse effects influence adherence.
- Online information sentiment may shape patient perceptions and decisions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze the sentiment of online information for psychiatric medications.
- To compare sentiment across different drug classes and individual medications.
Main Methods:
- Utilized natural language processing to score sentiment in web search results.
- Analyzed 12,733 results for 51 psychotropic medications (antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers).
- Compared sentiment within and across drug classes.
Main Results:
- Identified significant differences in positive and negative sentiment within drug classes.
- Sertraline, duloxetine, venlafaxine, paroxetine, quetiapine, and risperidone showed higher negative sentiment.
- Lithium and valproate exhibited less negative sentiment compared to other mood stabilizers.
Conclusions:
- A subset of psychotropic medications are associated with more negative online sentiment.
- Understanding these sentiment differences can help clinicians anticipate patient medication acceptance.
- Characterizing online sentiment provides a novel approach to medication comparison.
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