Future directions

The current research has presented preliminary findings on certain linguistic features that distinguish peer-to-peer communication from patient-to-provider

consultation, such as the patients’ frequent use of colloquial function words, monologue, and unanswerable puzzle. Such conclusions can be more firmly substantiated through further control experiments. Discourse data regarding professional and peer

communication in another domain other than depression should be included in future work to ensure that differences discovered in the current study are indeed

depression-specific rather than universal to all professional and peer discussion contexts.

As has been stated earlier, the objective of the present study is to probe into the discourse themes crucial to the depressed community when they communicate with experts and peers respectively via the Internet. The study has examined and compared several conversation topics that patients are inclined to address in professional

counselling and peer communication. However, due to the scope of research, the current research has not yet touched upon the specific language employed by people with clinical depression to depict each of the nine cardinal signs specified in DSM-V manual.

Furthermore, in order to engender practical development in clinical diagnosis of

the disorder, it is essential for future studies to include, possibly multimodal, real-world patient-doctor and peer-to-peer communication data, which can help to better reflect the actual scenarios in which depression discourses take place. By observing how the nine critical depressive symptoms delineated in DSM-V are lexicalized in the language of the depressed and how communication over depression really proceeds in clinical

encounters, it is hope that the depressed community’s physical symptoms and mental discomfort can be further understood and assisted with in both in online counselling and real-time clinical visits.

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