ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the analysis of forum data for identifying behavioral health patterns, which aims to explain these techniques and their implications for behavioral health. The disorders explored in methodology include posts from four various forums including OCD, Bluelight Marijuana, Substance Abuse, and suicide. The chapter examines specific techniques that have previously been used to analyze forum data and define behavioral health and public health issues, and explores the implications that this research has for big data analytics. Word clouds are one of the most popularly used visualization techniques for social media. Word clouds are effective for a very selective part of social media, for example, a few hundred tweets that are relevant to a certain answer for a specific question. The purpose of the Bluelight forum is to educate the public about responsible drug use by promoting free discussion.
