The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of society, not only bringing health hazards, but also posing challenges to public order, governments and mental health. Moreover, it is the first one in history in which people from around the world uses social media to massively express their thoughts and concerns. This study aims at examining the stages of crisis response and recovery as a sociological problem by operationalizing a well-known model of crisis stages in terms of a psycho-linguistic analysis. Based on a large collection of Twitter data spanning from March to August 2020 in Argentina, we present a thematic analysis on the differences in language used in social media posts, and look at indicators that reveal the different stages of a crisis and the country response thereof. The analysis was combined with a study of the temporal prevalence of mental health conversations across the time span. Beyond the Argentinian case-study, the proposed approach and analyses can be applied to any public large-scale data. This approach can provide insights for the design of public health politics oriented to monitor and eventually intervene during the different stages of a crisis, and thus improve the adverse mental health effects on the population.

中文翻译：

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在COVID-19大流行期间跟踪社交媒体上危机过程和心理健康的演变

COVID-19大流行已影响到社会的各个方面，不仅带来健康危害，而且对公共秩序，政府和精神健康构成挑战。此外，这是有史以来世界上第一位使用社交媒体大量表达其思想和关切的人。这项研究的目的是通过对心理学阶段的一种众所周知的危机阶段模型进行操作，从心理语言分析的角度来研究作为社会学问题的危机应对和恢复阶段。基于2020年3月至2020年8月在阿根廷收集的大量Twitter数据，我们对社交媒体帖子中使用的语言差异进行了主题分析，并研究了揭示危机不同阶段及其国家应对措施的指标。该分析与整个时间范围内心理健康对话的时间流行性研究相结合。除了阿根廷的案例研究之外，所提出的方法和分析还可以应用于任何公共的大规模数据。这种方法可以为旨在监测并最终在危机的不同阶段进行干预的公共卫生政治设计提供见识，从而改善对人口的不良心理健康影响。