Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Nicolas Stefanovitch, Purificação Silvano, Dimitar Iliyanov Dimitrov, Roman Yangarber, Nuno Guimarães, Elisa Sartori, Ion Androutsopoulos, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Jakub Piskorski. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been at the center of the lives of many of us for at least a couple of years, during which periods of isolation and lockdowns were common. How all that affected our mental well-being, especially the ones’ who were already in distress? To investigate the matter we analyse the online discussions on Sanctioned Suicide, a forum where users discuss suicide-related topics freely. We collected discussions starting from March 2018 (before pandemic) up to July 2022, for a total of 53K threads with 700K comments and 16K users. We investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the discussions in the forum. The data show that covid, while being present in the discussions, especially during the first lockdown, has not been the main reason why new users registered to the forum. However, covid appears to be indirectly connected to other causes of distress for the users, i.e. anxiety for the economy.