Characterizing Family Abuse in Suicidal Ideation Posts on Reddit: Large Language Model-Assisted Content Analysis

The study characterizes how family abuse manifests in social media suicidal ideation narratives, including self-disclosed demographics of those reporting abuse, abuse types, and relationships to perpetrators. Clinical studies have examined the link between family abuse and mental health, but its representation in social media discussions, particularly in relation to suicidal ideation, had remained largely unexplored. Content analysis of 27,434 posts from the Reddit SuicideWatch forum using a combination of manual review, large language model-assisted keyword expansion, natural language processing-based information extraction, and human validation.

In posts where suicidal ideation and family abuse co-occurred, physical abuse was the most frequently reported form of family abuse, followed by emotional or psychological abuse and sexual abuse. Provides descriptive quantification of the relative distribution of abuse types within suicidal ideation-related social media narratives. Physical abuse 683/975 (70.1%; 95% CI 67.18%-72.93%), emotional or psychological abuse 350/975 (35.9%; 95% CI 32.89%-38.91%), sexual abuse 296/975 (30.4%; 95% CI 27.47%-33.25%).

The parent category was the most frequently identified perpetrator category. Adds descriptive information on relationships to perpetrators in family abuse within suicidal ideation posts. Parent category 435/975 (44.6%; 95% CI 41.52%-47.75%).

The study demonstrates the potential of computational social media analysis to support descriptive, hypothesis-generating research and to inform the design of online support resources for family abuse-related suicidal distress. Applies a large language model-assisted content analysis approach to the previously less explored social media topic of co-occurring family abuse and suicidal ideation. Method combination includes manual review, large language model-assisted keyword expansion, natural language processing-based information extraction, and human validation.

This study applies to understanding descriptive characteristics of posts where suicidal ideation and family abuse co-occur on the Reddit SuicideWatch forum, for researchers attentive to mental health signals on social media and for designers of online support resources; its conclusions are positioned for descriptive and hypothesis-generating use rather than causal inference or clinical diagnosis.

Self-disclosed age and gender cover only part of the posts (313 for age, 150 for gender), and their representativeness warrants further observation; proportions of abuse types and perpetrator relationships are based on posts identified as co-occurring, and whether patterns are consistent across platforms and forums remains an open question; in addition, the loaded text is summary-level content without figures or full methodological detail, so evaluating the specific keyword expansion and human validation procedures would require consulting the original.