Temporal Arcs of Mental Health: Patterns Behind Changes in Depression over Time

Depression has been shown to follow seasonal patterns, with more episodes in the winter. In this paper, we draw inspiration from work on the emotional arcs of stories to uncover the patterns that individual users follow on the social media platform Reddit. By grouping users by their temporal arcs across a year, we identify four dominant arcs that can be connected to varied changes in depression throughout the year. The arcs that we uncover demonstrate interesting patterns that individual users follow beyond the patterns represented by the mean behavior among all users. Furthermore, the shapes of these arcs are consistent for both community and language-based metrics.