Abstract
<p>Mental health campaigns increasingly saturate public discourse, yet how people with lived experience receive them remains to be further understood. We analyzed over 13,000 campaign-related posts from ten Reddit mental health communities (2009 to 2026), combining validated computational classification, dictionary-based affective analysis (LIWC), structural topic modeling, and negative binomial engagement models to examine the tone, themes, temporal dynamics, and engagement of campaign-related discussion. Discussion was predominantly negative, marked by sadness, anxiety, and anger; over time, positivity and sadness declined while anxiety and anger rose. The most prevalent theme was cynicism toward inspirational or performative messaging, alongside crisis-line distrust and accounts of being dismissed when disclosing mental health concerns. Using the Reasoned Action Approach (RAA), we mapped themes onto behavioral, normative, and control beliefs about campaign-promoted behaviors while identifying emergent, campaign-specific practices that belief models do not anticipate. Anxiety and sadness predicted lower engagement, whereas critical, access-oriented, advocacy, and observance themes attracted greater visibility. Theoretically, the study extends the RAA from controlled message design to naturalistic, community-level reception, showing that online discourse functions as spontaneous belief elicitation and revealing a boundary condition we term awareness fatigue, in which repeated performative appeals become objects of critique rather than sources of support. Practically, the findings caution that engagement can signal disillusionment rather than persuasion, and that safeguarding mental health messaging requires treating lived-experience communities as formative partners and testing whether appeals are specific, emotionally tolerable, and responsive to material barriers rather than symbolic.</p>