Analysis Of The Interactive Social Mode Of The Virtual Patient Community

Binge-eating disorder(BED)is a psychosomatic disease of the eating disorders.Although the number of BED patients in China has increased in recent years,it is ignored,misunderstood,and even stigmatized because of lower public awareness.Therefore,it is a disease with low recognition rate,low doctor visit rate,and low effective treatment rate.With the popularity of social media,the virtual patient community has gradually become an important platform for BED patients to communication and seek for help,which has a profound impact on their social behavior and health status.This paper takes health communication as the background and focuses on the virtual patient communities of BED patients as the research field.By observing and interviewing BED patients in Baidu Tieba and Zhihu,this paper analyses the causes of community choice,community interaction behavior,community interaction impact,community interaction characteristics,and other existing problems.An interactive social model is found though research as below:"seeking help--emotional adjustment--relieving feelings--questions and answers--mutual help--changing behavior--reinventing themselves--group formation--offline communication".In addition,similar experience and mutual help of patients in the virtual patient communities are play essential roles in improving patients' effectiveness in disease treatment,finding and rebuilding themselves,coping with social relationships,and returning the real society.Meanwhile,the results also show that the virtual patient communities have inevitable problems in the development of the Internet.Therefore,comments on the health communication of these diseases are given in the end of this paper,aiming to raise the level of media health reporting and to draw social attention,so as to offer more assistance to this special disease group.The paper consists of six parts.The first chapter is composed of the research background,the research significance,the literature review,and the research design.The second chapter gives an overview of the two BED communities and analyzes the reasons for the communities' gathering and selection,of which three kinds of gathering reasons are summarized:"looking for the spiritual sustenance""exploring the problems of disorder",and "seeking for the social support".The third chapter analyzes the information dissemination methods of the BED communities and the communication activities of patients.Three layers of progressive communication methods of "confessing","questioning",and"altruistic" are extracted,and the interaction characteristics of each community is analyzed.The fourth chapter summarizes the impact of the interaction behavior of the BED communities,and proposes three kinds of effects:"improvement and reconstruction of self-identity","formation of online community",and "attempt of offline communication".The fifth part points out the existing problems of the BED communities.At the same time,it optimizes three strategies for the health communication of media,namely "strengthening the publicity of symptoms","improving the reporting methods",and "diversifying the dissemination of beauty".The conclusion refines the entire propagation mode of the BED communities and discuss the problems and deficiencies in this research.