April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: “World Mental Health Day”: Awareness, Destigmatization, and Promoting Social Support on Twitter
Background: Twitter has been a useful tool for discussing mental health issues. Twitter has commonly been used as a Social Networking Site (SNS) to promote various health campaigns and engage users in conversations around healthy behaviors. Mental health campaigns have previously been found to consist of themes around awareness of mental health as a medical condition, mental health as a social issue, mental health as a personal issue and information on mental health resources (Makita et al., 2021). However, in this study the authors’ goal is to explore what themes emerge from discussions around mental health during the World Mental health in 2021 during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Loneliness and isolation may lead to mental health issues like depression. The COVID-19 pandemic created a need for social isolation to reduce the spread of the disease however created a need for mental health issues to be addressed. Evident in the trends of using hashtags to create conversations on mental health topics, this study assesses conversations that contained #mentalhealth to explore emerging themes during a widespread social isolation event. Social media campaigns may typically start with a message/tweet from an influential figure or celebrity to create awareness, de-stigmatization of mental illnesses, and promote social support. However, this study analyzes tweets sent by various Twitter users about mental health in the wake of International Mental Health Day, i.e. October 10. Methods: A dataset of 86,000 Tweets that were sent between 10th -12th October was gathered by using Netlytic software. After removing the number of tweets remained 21,506. Non-English tweets were also removed. The final dataset contained 18,628 tweets. Inductive approach was used to identify the themes. We excluded tweets containing, videos, images, and audio. This study has only conducted the primary coding of the data yet. Results: Starting with an inductive approach, open-coding allowed for emerging themes to be generated Preliminary coding found main themes emerging: (i) social support, (ii) information on Mental Health resources; and (iii) awareness and advocacy for mental health support, the prevalence of mental health issues, autobiographies of recovering from MH issues (what worked), and symptoms of MH. Conclusion: This study aims to understand how mental health conversations evolve and what factors impact the de-stigmatization of mental health. Additionally, our goal is to better understand the roles organizations play in advocating for mental health support. Findings from this study will inform health communication scholars about certain message characteristics of social media health campaigns and how to effectively disseminate health campaigns through social media.