Drawing on the social media affordance construct, this paper presents a deeper understanding of the process of producing, circulating, consuming, and reproducing mental health information on social media. The paper examines mental health-related subreddits, Facebook pages, and online website forum threads. This paper goes beyond the binary perspective of identifying positive or negative effects of using social media on mental wellbeing to interrogate how social media affordances shape and are shaped by the communication process. The findings show that social media affordances shaped production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction processes through three main aspects namely sustaining already existing mental health information, and to a less extent creating opportunities for new information to emerge as well as sustaining dominant asymmetrical relations of power.

doi: https://www.doi.org/10.22720/HNMR.2021.5.2.171