LLM-Augmented Therapy Normalization and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Treatment-Resistant Depression on Reddit

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is a severe form of major depressive disorder in which patients do not achieve remission despite multiple adequate treatment trials. Evidence across pharmacologic options for TRD remains limited, and trials often do not fully capture patient-reported tolerability. Large-scale online peer-support narratives therefore offer a complementary lens on how patients describe and evaluate medications in real-world use. In this study, we curated a corpus of 5,059 Reddit posts explicitly referencing TRD from 3,480 subscribers across 28 mental health-related subreddits from 2010 to 2025. Of these, 3,839 posts mentioned at least one medication, yielding 23,399 mentions of 81 generic-name medications after lexicon-based normalization of brand names, misspellings, and colloquialisms. We developed an aspect-based sentiment classifier by fine-tuning DeBERTa-v3 on the SMM4H 2023 therapy-sentiment Twitter corpus with large language model based data augmentation, achieving a micro-F1 score of 0.800 on the shared-task test set. Applying this classifier to Reddit, we quantified sentiment toward individual medications across three categories: positive, neutral, and negative, and tracked patterns by drug, subscriber, subreddit, and year. Overall, 72.1% of medication mentions were neutral, 14.8% negative, and 13.1% positive. Conventional antidepressants, especially SSRIs and SNRIs, showed consistently higher negative than positive proportions, whereas ketamine and esketamine showed comparatively more favorable sentiment profiles. These findings show that normalized medication extraction combined with aspect-based sentiment analysis can help characterize patient-perceived treatment experiences in TRD-related Reddit discourse, complementing clinical evidence with large-scale patient-generated perspectives.