Collecting and validating experiential expertise is doable but poses methodological challenges

How do others cope? Extracting coping strategies for adverse drug events from social media

Patients advise their peers on how to cope with their illness in daily life on online support groups. To date, no efforts have been made to automatically extract recommended coping strategies from online patient discussion groups. We introduce this new task, which poses a number of challenges including complex, long entities, a large long-tailed label space, and cross-document relations. We present an initial ontology for coping strategies as a starting point for future research on coping strategies, and the first end-to-end pipeline for extracting coping strategies for side effects. We also compared two possible computational solutions for this novel and highly challenging task; multi-label classification and named entity recognition (NER) with entity linking (EL). We evaluated our methods on the discussion forum from the Facebook group of the worldwide patient support organization 'GIST support international' (GSI); GIST support international donated the data to us. We found that coping strategy extraction is difficult and both methods attain limited performance (measured with F₁ score) on held out test sets; multi-label classification outperforms NER+EL (F₁=0.220 vs F₁=0.155). An inspection of the multi-label classification output revealed that for some of the incorrect predictions, the reference label is close to the predicted label in the ontology (e.g. the predicted label 'juice' instead of the more specific reference label 'grapefruit juice'). Performance increased to F₁=0.498 when we evaluated at a coarser level of the ontology. We conclude that our pipeline can be used in a semi-automatic setting, in interaction with domain experts to discover coping strategies for side effects from a patient forum. For example, we found that patients recommend ginger tea for nausea and magnesium and potassium supplements for cramps. This information can be used as input for patient surveys or clinical studies.

An exploration of the conditions for deploying self-management strategies: a qualitative study of experiential knowledge in depression

BACKGROUND

Living with recurrent, and/or chronic depression requires long-term management in addition to active coping on a day-to-day basis. Previous research on long-term management, and coping with depression mainly focused on identifying self-management strategies. However, research on the conditions for deploying self-management strategies in depression is lacking. By means of exploring the development of experiential knowledge in depression, and its relation with coping with depression, this study aims to gain insight into the conditions for deploying self-management strategies.

METHODS

In the current qualitative study, individual pathways to recovery, living with depression, and recurrence risk were assessed, including but not limited to long-term management. 'Experiential knowledge', which can be defined as patients' unique knowledge and own lived experiences in facilitating and debilitating factors in the recovery process and coping with the disorder, was used as a sensitizing concept. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals who experienced at least two depressive episodes and were currently in (partial) remission, plus two deviant cases were interviewed to check for saturation. Until saturation was achieved, participants were purposively selected to include diverse perspectives on coping with depression. Data were analysed using a narrative research method.

RESULTS

The results show that deploying self-management strategies are an integral part of 'experiential knowledge'. The evolvement of experiential knowledge can be seen as a cyclical process of the main themes that were identified as relevant when coping with depression: introspection, empowerment, self-management strategies, and external moderators of the environment. The identification of supporting and impeding factors in coping with depression from a patient perspective might increase a sustainable use of self-management strategies.

CONCLUSION

These results highlight the need for an individualised holistic model of coping with depression, both in research, and in practice. By means of integrating experiential knowledge in this holistic approach, the conditions for deployment of self-management strategies in depressive patients can be specified.