The study of the phenomenon of depression is not new in sociology, but since the depression
is becoming a wider social problem, it is still a relevant issue today. In addition to the biomedical and psychological aspects of depression, the sociological perspective is becoming more
noteworthy in the discourse about the causes of depression. In the research of the discourse
on depression, the online texts offer many new possibilities, as the forum’s anonymity and
accessability make the online seeking for help popular. In this research, natural language
processing (logistic regression) was applied to find patterns in the definition of depression
in lay discourses. These methods make it possible to analyze a large amount of text - which
would have been difficult to process with human resources. During the analysis, 67 857 posts of
English-speaking online forums were categorized along the categories of the scientific discourse
about depression. This study presents the first results, which shows logistic regression classifier
performs like the annotators. . Although the research has analyzed English-speaking forums, my
findings may be useful to anyone observing abstract sociological concepts in online texts written
by users.