Social stigma and feelings of helplessness make it difficult for young people to seek face-to-face counselling for mental health problems and suicidality (Harris et al., 2009). Because of their anonymity and accessibility, online counselling services such as This is Me from the National Institute of Public Health are an important source of social support in such cases. Since certain components of counselling are missing here, it is crucial for counsellors to know the characteristics of users in order to be able to approach them, including through the choice of appropriate vocabulary and writing style. The main purpose of Master’s thesis is to examine differences in themes, vocabulary and sentiment between suicide-themed questions and answers and other questions and answers in the online counselling service This is Me. Through a linguistic analysis of questions on the This is Me counselling service, we addressed more than 19 thousand questions from adolescents and answers from counsellors for the period 2012-2021. The analysis included word clouds, hierarchical clustering, sentiment analysis and multiple linear regression. Results showed that themes related to problems at home and at school and themes related to serious mental illness emerge with suicide-themed questions. We found that counsellors’ responses in general reflected a positive sentiment in suicide question types, although users had a highly more negative sentiment here. The sentiment in the service is also influenced by other factors such as gender and age. Findings provide insight into the communication dynamics and counselling style in terms of sentiment between adolescents and counsellors, which could be helpful to the editors of the online counselling service This is me.
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