Background: Mental health challenges are thought to affect approximately 10% of the global population each year, with many of those affected going untreated because of the stigma and limited access to services. As social media lowers the barrier for joining difficult conversations and finding supportive groups, Twitter is an open source of language data describing the changing experience of a stigmatized group. Objective: By measuring changes in the conversation around mental health on Twitter, we aim to quantify the hypothesized increase in discussions and awareness of the topic as well as the corresponding reduction in stigma around mental health. Methods: We explored trends in words and phrases related to mental health through a collection of 1-, 2-, and 3-grams parsed from a data stream of approximately 10% of all English tweets from 2010 to 2021. We examined temporal dynamics of mental health language and measured levels of positivity of the messages. Finally, we used the ratio of original tweets to retweets to quantify the fraction of appearances of mental health language that was due to social amplification. Results: We found that the popularity of the phrase mental health increased by nearly two orders of magnitude between 2012 and 2018. We observed that mentions of mental health spiked annually and reliably because of mental health awareness campaigns as well as unpredictably in response to mass shootings, celebrities dying by suicide, and popular fictional television stories portraying suicide. We found that the level of positivity of messages containing mental health, while stable through the growth period, has declined recently. Finally, we observed that since 2015, mentions of mental health have become increasingly due to retweets, suggesting that the stigma associated with the discussion of mental health on Twitter has diminished with time. Conclusions: These results provide useful texture regarding the growing conversation around mental health on Twitter and suggest that more awareness and acceptance has been brought to the topic compared with past years.

中文翻译：

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量化 10 年来 Twitter 上有关心理健康的语言使用的变化：观察性研究


背景：据认为，心理健康挑战每年影响全球约 10% 的人口，其中许多受影响者由于耻辱和获得服务的机会有限而得不到治疗。随着社交媒体降低了加入困难对话和寻找支持群体的障碍，Twitter 成为描述受污名群体不断变化的经历的语言数据的开源来源。目标：通过测量 Twitter 上有关心理健康的对话的变化，我们的目的是量化假设的讨论和对该主题的认识的增加，以及心理健康耻辱感的相应减少。方法：我们通过从 2010 年至 2021 年约 10% 的英语推文的数据流中解析出的 1-gram、2-gram 和 3-gram 集合，探索了与心理健康相关的单词和短语的趋势。心理健康语言和测量的信息的积极性水平。最后，我们使用原始推文与转发的比率来量化由于社交放大而出现的心理健康语言的比例。结果：我们发现，2012 年至 2018 年间， “心理健康”一词的受欢迎程度增加了近两个数量级。我们观察到，由于心理健康意识宣传活动以及对大规模枪击事件的不可预测的反应，心理健康的提及量逐年激增。 、自杀身亡的名人以及描绘自杀的流行虚构电视故事。我们发现，包含心理健康的信息的积极性水平虽然在整个成长期保持稳定，但最近有所下降。 最后，我们观察到，自 2015 年以来，由于转发，提及心理健康的情况越来越多，这表明 Twitter 上讨论心理健康相关的耻辱感随着时间的推移而减少。结论：这些结果为推特上日益增长的关于心理健康的讨论提供了有用的信息，并表明与过去几年相比，人们对该主题有了更多的认识和接受。