What internet search patterns can teach us about coping

Fifty years ago, renowned psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book that would change the way the medical community cared for the terminally ill. “On Death and Dying” shattered the American taboo of talking about death and laid the foundation for a five-stage grieving model that is still widely accepted today. Once we saw that a Hidden Markov Model with five hidden states was indeed a good way to describe the search behaviors we had observed, we built separate models for people who asked about acute forms of cancer and for people who asked about more chronic cancers, the two groups being defined according to rates of survival. The stages also differ in the information people seek: in cases of chronic cancers social support is an important topic, whereas in cases of acute cancers treatment options feature prominently. We overlaid this network on the search data and examined how the searches of friends of people diagnosed with cancer looked when they searched for information about cancer. As we have learned from our data, people with different mental states require different information, and their mental state changes rapidly in the first few days after diagnosis.