Mental Health Discourses on Twitter during Mental Health Awareness Week

Abstract

Promoting health-related campaigns on Twitter has increasingly become a world-wide choice to raise awareness and disseminate health information. Data retrieved from Twitter are now being used to explore how users express their views, attitudes and personal experiences of health-related issues. We focused on Twitter discourse reproduced during Mental Health Awareness Week 2017 by examining 1,200 tweets containing the keywords ‘mental health’, ‘mental illness’, ‘mental disorders’ and ‘#MHAW’. The analysis revealed ‘awareness and advocacy’, ‘stigmatization’, and ‘personal experience of mental health/illness’ as the central discourses within the sample. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research on digitally-mediated health communication.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Alejandro Bahena’s contribution to initial pilot coding and preliminary statistical tests.

Disclosure of interest

The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Authors’ contribution

MM conceptualized the study; led data collection/management, coding, analysis and interpretation; wrote and edited the article, and prepared figures/tables. AMB contributed to coding, conducting descriptive statistics, editing tables, writing and editing of the article. SM contributed to data collection, prepared figures and reviewed drafts of the article. MT conducted statistical tests and reviewed drafts of the article. All authors critically reviewed and approved the final version of the article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.