Twitter Mental Health

Conversations of social media and mental health have circulated platforms such as Twitter for years. To begin our research process, we sourced articles and studies from UCLA Scholar, UCLA Library, and other credible databases relating to the topics of Twitter and Mental Health. Articles ranged from how social media usage linked to brain changes, to quantifying changes of language used around mental health, Covid-19 and its impact on mental health on Twitter, and more. One such source, “The American Psychiatric Association Healthy Minds Social Media and Mental Health Poll,” presented a collection of statistics and visualizations in order to shed light on the effect of social media on the mental health of American adults (APA, 2022). Specifically, they found a conflict between perceptions of social media’s impact on personal mental health and its impact on society as a whole, concluding a mismatch and wide range of sentiment around social media. In another article, “#WhyWeTweetMH,” their research determined that there are 4 main reasons for this: a sense of community, raising awareness/combating stigma, a safe space for expression, and for coping/empowerment (Berry, 2017). In contrast, a study titled “Quantifying Changes in the Language Used Around Mental Health on Twitter Over 10 Years” examined not only sentiment and discourse about the topics but how often they were discussed and its impact on sentiment (Stupinski, 2022). With an increase of retweets and replies regarding mental health, positive sentiment dwindled. They further examined the positive correlation between mental health conversations and significant events such as mental health campaigns/events/weeks.  

Our literature review encompassed broad topics about social media’s interaction with mental health, which allowed us to gain insight into the “when” and the “why” of mental health discourse on social media platforms such as Twitter. Most literature agreed with our own analysis that social media has a negative affect on user mental health, although the demographic focus was different across articles. Based on the article “Influence of social media on mental health: a systematic review,” we also gained insight into the problem of addiction and how this explains the paradox of social media usage despite its negative mood affects (Sharma, 2020). All of this information is useful for our project because we were able to compare and corroborate our own findings while gaining deeper knowledge and viewing different perspectives about our topic.