UC Berkeley

Diseases of despair, often characterized as morbidity associated with feelings of hopelessness, have received public and scientific attention in recent years. One common disease of despair is alcohol and other drug (AOD) misuse. AOD misuse is pervasive and harmful to individual and societal well-being. Although many individuals do not participate in any formal treatment, many more people identify as being “in recovery” or otherwise having resolved a prior issue with AOD. Capturing these persons' recovery definitions (e.g., abstinence, process of growth) and experiences have proved challenging due to how people (do not) identify themselves in recovery. The utilization of different research recruitment methods and analyses may clarify this. Learning from individuals outside formal pathways of treatment and recovery may illuminate mechanisms for innovative practice methods that promote well-being, and observing recovery discourse in new ways may therefore elucidate ways to prevent AOD relapse and sustain recovery.

Interventions targeting emotion regulation and negative affect to alleviate hopelessness have been explored as mechanisms for facilitating treatment and preventing relapse. Many of these treatments seek to reduce emotional distress (i.e., negative affect). Relatively unexamined is the use of positive affect (i.e., positive emotions or positive feelings) in the AOD treatment and recovery literature. Studies of positive affect in the AOD treatment and recovery context have generally been conducted with very specific AOD groups (e.g., methamphetamine using men who have sex with men) and use small sample sizes. Additionally, this literature primarily discusses positive feelings related to buffering stress, acquiring resources (e.g., social connection), and reducing unhelpful health behaviors (e.g., AOD misuse) as concepts of positive affect. Yet, it overlooks a concept evoked by the public: self-love. Self-love is not clearly defined but seems to present a positive view of accepting oneself, signaling care for the self, and experiencing positive emotions and social connection. While the literature primarily uses the constructs of self-esteem and narcissism to operationalize self-love, laypersons may hold different beliefs about self-love and make different use of this concept.Both self-love and AOD recovery are discussed extensively on social media platforms. As of December 2022, Instagram has almost 94 million posts with #selflove (Instagram, 2022) and has increased by an estimated 56 million posts since this project’s inception in March of 2020. Recovery-related tags, like #sobriety, #12steps, and #AlcoholicsAnonymous, are also prevalent. Despite these topics’ popularity, there is a dearth of research exploring these topics on social media. To capture the general public’s views of self-love (i.e., lay beliefs), specifically how people make meaning of self-love and within an AOD recovery context, this study observes invocations of self-love in general and by people referencing AOD recovery on social media. Leveraging social media for the study of a positive affect-related concept contributes to the research by accessing a large sample size and a broad spectrum of recovery discourse.

Using #selflove social media posts from 2019, this mixed-methods dissertation aimed to uncover lay beliefs of self-love in a general and in an AOD recovery context in 188,114 and 902 posts, respectively. This was done through an iterative process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting social media posts and then theorizing and validating their meaning. The dissertation employed topic modeling, a method that integrates machine learning and natural language processing, to identify topics of self-love in social media (i.e., Instagram and Twitter) posts that are also tagged with allusions to recovery. Probability densities and data mapping visualization were used to present clusters of self-love, and human labeling further delineated specific themes. Next, utilizing computational prediction modeling, annotations of allusions of recovery and self-love meanings were used to train an algorithm with the aim of accurately classifying the co-occurrence of self-love and AOD themes related to abstinence talk versus abstinence silence (i.e., no mention of abstinence in a post). Lastly, an algorithm was trained to predict AOD recovery content in social media posts.

Findings demonstrate that self-love on social media encompasses four primary categories: relationship to the self, wellness, self-care, and engagement with others. Within an AOD recovery and #selflove context, four categories emerged: process of growth, learning from the past, building new beginnings, and getting help. Both samples—#selflove generally and the AOD recovery subsample—contained numerous similarities within these topics, such as prioritizing the self, utilizing coping strategies, and a process of change. Key differences are that the AOD recovery subsample highlighted learning from the past while the self-love sample included self-promoting discourse (within the engagement with others category). Additionally, when narrowing the focus to the #selflove AOD recovery subsample to predict abstinence talk and abstinence silence, several paths of co-occurring self-love and AOD recovery were found. Abstinence talk was predicted by expressing positive emotions, taking responsibility, using recovery slogans and mentioning alcohol, and discussing alternatives to 12-steps programs without mentioning AOD substance and anger. Abstinence silence was predicted in discussions that mentioned alcohol in some capacity (e.g., past use) without referencing recovery slogans. Lastly, in a quest to predict AOD recovery content, this study was also able to develop an algorithm with 99% accuracy and an F1 score of .99 (which factors in precision and recall) to differentiate between AOD recovery content and non-AOD recovery content within #selflove. Words related to abstinence (e.g., sober), substance (e.g., alcohol, heroin), self-empowerment (e.g., commit, admit), and positive emotions (i.e., gratitude, inspiration) were found to be important in predicting AOD recovery content compared to non-recovery #selflove content. Based on these findings, layperson beliefs about self-love and within AOD recovery are discussed more in depth in this dissertation’s discussion chapter as a relationship with the self, well-being, and self-care.

By examining social media users’ beliefs of self-love and within an AOD recovery context, there are multiple implications for practice and research. This line of research elucidated lay beliefs of self-love in an AOD recovery context and contributed to extant research by examining a positive affect-related concept with a large sample size. This research clarified existing self-love messaging, offered language to practitioners of how abstinence is discussed, and created an algorithm that could identify AOD recovery content for potential future study and participant recruitment. This work has a greater goal of building a future line of research to examine self-love as a mechanism to prevent AOD misuse and diseases of despair and facilitate behavioral health interventions in treatment and recovery. While this study is situated within AOD recovery, self-love may have broader implications for other behavioral health issues, such as depression and eating disorders.