The burden of COVID-19 on mental health of citizens has already been measured in a study published online in mid-December, but a group of data scientists decided to study even more theimpact of the pandemic on the population analyzing 94 million tweets published in the first months of the lockdown.
The study published in the online journal IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems was led by researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the University of Essex in the UK. In it, the team of experts leveraged machine learning to develop a system that could understand what the posts related to depression, stress, anxiety and suicidal thoughts and collect some keywords and other data from them.
The goal was in fact to rely on the posts published on Jack Dorsey’s social network to identify changes in the levels of such conditions in the community, referring in particular to Australian users residing in 128 areas of New South Wales between 1 January and 22 May 2020, although this country was less affected than other areas such as the United States, Italy and other European states.
This small “limit”, however, has still made it possible to understand that the first lockdown implemented in 2020 had a particularly profound impact on mental health of citizens: By ranking the contents of the tweets (including emojis) by linking them to typical symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and more, it was possible to notice a significant increase in March to the peak of the 26th day of the month, exactly in the period in which the highest number of cases was recorded.
Study co-author Guandong Xu said: “Social media provides a real-time snapshot of people’s thoughts, feelings and activities in daily life. Each tweet reports a user’s mental state and emotional well-being at that time. Aggregating these digital traces makes it possible to monitor mental health on a large scale, which has become a new and growing area of concern for public health and health research. Identifying community dynamics of depression can help governments and policy makers better understand the psychological impacts of policy decisions and identify communities that may require greater public health support “.
Staying in the world of psychology, did you know that taking an afternoon nap improves our mental agility?
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