LLM-Augmented Therapy Normalization and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Treatment-Resistant Depression on Reddit
arXiv Preprint Archive March 12, 2026 Yuxin Zhu, Sahithi Lakamana, Masoud Rouhizadeh et al.
Reddit posts about treatment-resistant depression (TRD) show that 72.1% of medication mentions are neutral, 14.8% negative, and 13.1% positive. Conventional antidepressants, especially SSRIs and SNRIs, receive consistently more negative than positive sentiment, while ketamine and esketamine have comparatively more favorable sentiment profiles. The study analyzed 5,059 Reddit posts from 3,480 subscribers across 28 mental health subreddits from 2010 to 2025, extracting 23,399 mentions of 81 medications. An aspect-based sentiment classifier fine-tuned on DeBERTa-v3 achieved a micro-F1 score of 0.800. These large-scale patient narratives offer a complementary view to clinical trials on medication tolerability and effectiveness.