Deep Learning for Identification of Alcohol-Related Content on Social Media Reddit and Twitter: Exploratory Analysis of Alcohol-Related Outcomes PMC

The CDC defines binge drinking as drinking that brings your blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08% or more. This is usually achieved if you consume five or more standard drinks on a single occasion for men or four or more drinks on a single occasion for women. The typical sober house recommendation is to stick to 1-2 drinks per hour. Whatever the reason, there are serious consequences when someone with AUD drinks. The justifications and excuses are harmful and will soon lead the individual to drink in the manner with which he or she is most familiar.

So what happens when you stop enabling someone with an alcohol or substance use disorder? Many times when an enabling system is removed, the fear will force a person to seek help, but there are no guarantees. Saying, “If you don’t quit drinking, I will leave!” is an ultimatum and a threat, but saying, “I will not have drinking in my home” is setting a boundary. You can’t control whether someone quits drinking or not, but you can decide what kind of behavior you will accept or not accept in your life.

years sober

It can also relax the muscles leading towards your stomach, increasing the likelihood of leaking stomach acid. Heavy drinking can lead to easy bruising and bleeding, and not just because you’re more prone to falling and hitting table corners when drunk. University Health Services is committed to providing high-quality care to patients of all ages, races, ethnicities, physical abilities or attributes, religions, sexual orientations, or gender identities/expression. University Health Services is committed to providing high-quality care to patients of all ages, races, ethnicities, physical abilities or attributes, religions, sexual orientations or gender identities/expression. People who drink a significant amount or drink on a regular basis can develop a chemical dependence on the substance. When they suddenly stop giving the body the substance it has become dependent on, it can send the body, brain and neurotransmitters into shock.

• On average, members see a 30% reduction in alcohol consumption in 3 months, leading to improved sleep, diet, and overall wellbeing.
• I was very shy growing up because I didn’t have a lot of friends.
• There often isn’t a single factor that causes people to engage in enabling a loved one with a substance use problem.
• The long-term outlook for alcohol addiction treatment depends on the extent of organ damage and whether the person continues to drink after rehab.
• Sunnyside is the leading alcohol health platform focused on moderation and mindfulness, not sobriety.

The risk of developing alcoholic liver disease is greatest in heavy drinkers, but one report stated that five years of drinking just two alcoholic beverages a day can damage the liver. Ninety percent of people who have four drinks a day show signs of alcoholic fatty liver. A notable benefit of using hashtags and subreddits as platform-specific labels for studying alcohol-related outcomes is interpretability. Although deep learning models excel at understanding massive quantities of data, many NLP and deep learning models rely on complex feature representations to classify or characterize text.

A sober influencer says addicts as well as their families should seek support

The black-colored dashed line signifies the split of pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. The week of March 23, 2020, is highlighted by the grey dashed vertical line. One thing that members of Al-Anon learn is that they no longer have to accept unacceptable behavior in their lives. You may not be able to control the behavior of someone else, but you do have choices when it comes to what you find unacceptable. Rushing in to rescue someone may satisfy a personal desire to feel needed, but it doesn’t really help the situation. It only enables the person to avoid the consequences of their actions.

The amount of time that it takes for alcohol to completely leave your bloodstream depends on multiple factors, including age, gender, health, genetic makeup and history of alcohol use. According to the National Library of Medicine, alcohol withdrawal typically begins within eight hours after the last drink, but it can also take a few days to begin in some cases. The symptoms usually peak within 24 to 72 hours, but some can continue for several weeks. Alcohol detection tests can still detect alcohol in your urine, saliva and hair after it has been completely eliminated from your bloodstream.

Supporting information

Like most social media studies, our data is not representative of the general population even though Reddit is one of the most popular platforms in the US. In [45] we find that approximately 50% of the Reddit traffic flows from the US. Reddit being an anonymous forum does not reveal demographics of users and we extrapolate the country traffic distribution on our dataset. While we included most subreddits that deal with the four broader health behaviors of interest to this study with reasonable participation, we could have missed some.

Enabling is defined as doing things for a person with an alcohol problem that they normally could and would do for themselves if they were sober. In contrast, helping is doing something that the alcoholic could not or would not do for themselves if sober. Helping does not protect an individual from the consequences of their actions. Everybody knew when I was in the hospital that something bad was happening, you can’t hide that. My family and kids were called and told that I may not make it; to have survived that experience in the hospital is rare.

What Happens When an Alcoholic Starts Drinking Again?

The generalization of such models necessitates the creation of individual models for each particular outcome and geographic area. Finally, these models may fail to take advantage of extensive research on themed communities to understand alcohol use and other outcomes of interest [30,39,40,76,106,109,110]. In contrast, the method outlined here may help create more efficient public health interventions to analyze the alcohol consumption behavior for a given geographic area of interest, such as a city or hospital catchment area. This approach is particularly useful when the relevant language is dynamic or contains area-specific slang, making previously established dictionary-based methods incomplete or impractical. In particular, our proposed methodology for identifying hashtags using a previously trained deep learning model can be useful for detecting alcohol consumption behavior on various social media platforms.

Then, we study changes in words, phrases, and topic features pre- and during COVID-19 and trends in language markers across 2019 and 2020. Alcohol-induced cardiomyopathy is a condition that can have major impacts on your life over time. While many people will recover from this condition if they abstain from alcohol, others will have symptoms and related problems for the rest of their life.

Reddit was also used to characterize and predict shifts from a discussion of mental health to the expression of suicidal ideation [20, 25], albeit pre-pandemic. A study showed that people widely used social media to express their moods [26]. The same study predicted depressed users as well as estimated their depression intensity using computational linguistics [26]. County level tweets within the US were used to correlate stressful emotions with health behaviors and socioeconomic characteristics [28]. 15.4 million Facebook messages were assessed to demonstrate that open-vocabulary analyses could yield correlations between personality and behavior as manifested through natural language [29].