In an era of unprecedented mental health awareness, social scientists are turning to computational methods to understand how Americans conceptualize psychological well-being. In her forthcoming book, sociologist Amy Johnson examines four decades of mental health conversation and challenges a fundamental assumption that increased dialogue about mental health reduces stigma.

Working at the intersection of cultural sociology and data science, she has spent years analyzing millions of texts, from newspaper archives spanning 1980 to 2020 to five years of daily posts from Reddit's r/mentalhealth forum. Her research reveals a more complex picture than the prevailing narrative of progress suggests.

"Language is our window into culture, especially language that's preserved historically," says Johnson, assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. "Reading it, looking at it, analyzing it tells us how culture and cultural ideas change."

Her investigation began with a straightforward question: What do ordinary people, not mental health professionals, think about mental health? While surveys and quantified measures of public opinion exist, Johnson sought something deeper. "To really get at culture, I had to go to text data," she notes.

She started with news media, pulling articles from six major publications through ProQuest, a comprehensive database of periodicals. Her search parameters were deliberately broad: articles either explicitly mentioning mental health and illness or tagged as related to these topics. The resulting dataset provided insight into dominant cultural narratives, the widely shared ideas that news media typically report. But newspaper coverage left a critical question unanswered — how do individuals apply these macro-level cultural concepts to their own experiences? This question led Johnson to Reddit.

The Appeal of Anonymous Disclosure

Reddit offered something invaluable for Johnson's research — authentic discussions of personal mental health experiences.

"Reddit has a wealth of forums or subreddits about mental health," Johnson says. "People go online and describe their emotions, their past treatment, stating how they feel and how they're making sense of it."

The platform's anonymity proves crucial. Users discuss stigmatizing experiences without worrying about "saving face or preserving their reputation," Johnson says. This freedom from social consequences creates what Johnson characterizes as "the most normalizing space for what we would call extreme mental health experiences."

"On Reddit, people are more open to a huge array of negative emotions," she says. "People basically normalize everything. Someone will say, 'Oh, I'm hearing voices,' or 'I'm experiencing suicidal ideation' and others will respond, 'OK, me too,' or 'You're not alone in that.' And then what do we do from there? Versus if you were to tell a teacher that you're experiencing suicidal ideation, they would call the police."

Building the Dataset

For her newspaper analysis, Johnson employed topic modeling, a computational method that identifies themes within large text datasets based on word patterns and language use. This approach revealed what topics dominated mental health discourse during different periods and how the prevalence of these themes shifted over time. She also employed word embeddings, a technique that captures connotations and semantic relationships. This method illustrates how terms' meanings align with other concepts. The work reveals, for instance, that "mental illness" carries connotations closer to "dangerousness" than "mental health" does.

The Reddit component required different infrastructure. Beginning in 2021, Johnson pulled archival data using Pushshift, a tool that aggregates Reddit posts and comments. She then created a web scraper that automatically collected new posts and comments daily from r/mentalhealth. This process ran continuously for four years, ultimately capturing every post and comment on the subreddit during that period. She chose r/mentalhealth specifically for its generality. Unlike specialized forums such as r/ADHD, this subreddit allowed users to discuss any mental health topic, providing a more comprehensive view of how people conceptualize psychological experiences.

Johnson conducted thematic analysis parallel to her newspaper work, identifying patterns in both posts and comments and analyzing their relationships. If a post discussed a particular type of negative emotion, for example, were comments more likely to mention medical treatment?

The Paradox of Mental Health Discourse

Johnson's central finding challenges conventional wisdom about destigmatization. "Just because we're talking about mental health so much more now does not mean that we have destigmatized it. We're not in any sort of moment of acceptance of mental health and illness," she says.

Instead, increased mental health literacy may have an unintended consequence — providing more sophisticated language for creating social divisions. "The fact that we talk more about mental health has equipped more people to also use the language of mental illness to create divisions. To say, well, this person is different. This person is not like me. This person should be kept away from me, or they're dangerous," Johnson adds.

This dynamic reflects the inherent structure of medical frameworks, which require distinguishing between normal and abnormal states. As mental health concepts become more prevalent, people increasingly invoke the pathological end of the spectrum — mental illness — to justify exclusion and othering.

From Johnson's sociological perspective, mental health and illness represent subjective interpretive processes rather than objective truths. "There's no biological basis for diagnosis. There's no ground truth at all. It's all a process of interpretation," she says. This theoretical position grounds her analysis of how people collectively construct meanings around psychological experiences.

Implications and Future Directions

Johnson's book release is anticipated for early 2027. She describes it as a "crossover book," which aims to speak both to academic scholars and general readers — a challenging balance that required careful attention to accessibility while maintaining scholarly rigor. Her work demonstrates how computational methods can illuminate cultural patterns invisible in smaller-scale analyses. By analyzing millions of texts across decades and platforms, she reveals that progress in mental health discourse is more complicated than simple linear improvement. As society develops more sophisticated language for discussing psychological experiences, that same vocabulary becomes available for reinforcing boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal."

This finding carries implications for clinicians, policymakers and advocates. Increasing mental health literacy, while valuable, does not automatically reduce stigma. Understanding how cultural frameworks shape both individual sense-making and collective responses remains essential for anyone working to improve mental health outcomes. Johnson's research suggests that genuine progress requires not just more conversation, but critical examination of the conceptual structures underlying that conversation.