Quantifying the Pollan Effect: Investigating the Impact of Emerging Psychiatric Interventions on Online Mental Health Discourse

Abstract

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has shown significant promise in alleviating treatment-resistant mental illness, prompting excitement among people with lived experience of mental illness. The emerging collective perception of psychedelics as tools for mental health has been dubbed the Pollan Effect. We investigate whether the Pollan Effect carries to online community discussions concerning psilocybin-containing mushrooms (PCMs). Through a matched computational analysis of 676,875 longform Reddit posts describing PCM use spanning a decade, we provide evidence of the Pollan Effect in terms of increased health discourse around PCMs following two inception points—release of a book and subsequent documentary on PCMs. We then introduce the notion of a Pollan shift, which we witness through increased collective sharing of emotional and social experiences following the two inception points. Our findings offer insights into how online discourse could be representative of emerging social movements around new psychiatric treatments, and the role of platforms in sensemaking and research.