Characterizing the Temporal, Emotional, and Social Patterns of Adolescent Substance Use Discussions on Reddit

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical developmental period marked by heightened emotional sensitivity, social stress, and vulnerability to substance use. However, traditional research methods provide limited access to adolescents' authentic experiences, hindering efforts to develop evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies. Social media provides a unique opportunity to observe adolescents' naturally occurring discussions about substance use, offering valuable insights into their opinions, emotions, and lived experiences that can inform early prevention and intervention strategies. In this study, we analyze large-scale Reddit discussions related to substance use among adolescents between 2018 and 2023. Leveraging hour-by-day temporal analysis, sentiment and emotion classification, and transformer-based topic modeling (BERTopic), we examine the interaction between time, emotion, and semantic content in adolescent substance use discourse. Our findings reveal pronounced weekend and late-night peaks in substance-related discussions, a dominance of negative emotions such as sadness and fear, and distinct semantic topics centered on peer relationships, family conflict, emotional distress, and substance-specific experiences. These findings advance our understanding of adolescent substance use in naturalistic online settings and provide empirical evidence to support the development of more timely, targeted, and evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies.