Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 18, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 30, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 3, 2022
Tracking the impact of COVID-19 and lockdown policy on public mental health using social media: an infoveillance study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic and its corresponding preventive and control measures have increased the mental burden to the public. Tracking public mental status can facilitate timely mental health intervention, and optimize epidemiology prevention and control strategies.
Objective:
To build a public mental health tracking pipeline using social media data for understanding public mental status regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures.
Methods:
In this study, we conducted social media based analyses on temporal, geographical and occupational distributions of public mental health status during the pandemic, and how the public reacted to the lock-down policy from the perspective of mental health.
Results:
A total of 2,973,319 mental health-related tweets posted by 1,778,140 users were extracted, of which 1,393,025 (46.85%) tweets were related to "depression". And 1,290,793 (43.41%), 265,002 (8.91%) and 98,791 (3.32%) tweets were related to "anxiety", "insomnia", and "addiction", respectively. Compared to the general public, healthcare workers had higher concerns on three types of mental health problems (depression, insomnia, addiction) (P<.001) and focused more on clinical topics while the public worried more about daily life issues. The lockdown policy in New York was correlated with a proportional decrease of mental health-related tweets, while Florida had an opposite correlation (both P<.05).
Conclusions:
Our findings indicate that the mental burden brought from the pandemic and the control measures varied across occupations and locations and changed over time. Large scale social media data can timely and effectively tracking public mental health concerns during pandemic.
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