Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 6, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 13, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 14, 2020
Increased internet searches for insomnia as a sensitive indicator for global mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic
ABSTRACT
Background:
Real-time global mental health surveillance is an urgent need for tracking the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objective:
This study aimed to use Google Trends data to investigate the impact of the pandemic on populations’ mental health through three keyword searches indicating the varied extent of mental distress, namely insomnia, depression, and suicide.
Methods:
We estimated the increase of search queries for each country by the actual daily search value from March 20 to April 19, 2020, higher than the 95% confidence intervals of the forecast from the three-month baseline via autoregressive integrated moving average modelling. We examined the correlation between the increase of COVID-19 deaths and the number of days with significant increased search volumes for insomnia, depression, and suicide among 19 countries.
Results:
The countries with the greatest increases in searches for insomnia were Iran, Spain, the United States, and Italy, and these countries showed a significant increase in insomnia searches more than 10 of the 31 days observed. The number of increased death cases was positively correlated to the number of days with an increased search for insomnia among the 19 countries, with the Spearman’s correlation coefficient (rho) of 0.64, P = 0.003. By contrast, there was no significant correlation between increased death cases and increased searches for depression (rho = -0.12, P = 0·633) or suicide (rho = -0.07, P = 0.788).
Conclusions:
Our analysis suggests that insomnia could be a part of routine screening for mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Citation
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