Analysis of social media for psychological surveillance during disasters
Citation: Karmegam D, Ramamoorthy T, Mappillairajan B. A systematic review of techniques employed for determining mental health using social media in psychological surveillance during disasters. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. 2020;14(2):265-72.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: No.
Funding sources: Nothing noted.
What is this? Disasters can lead to adverse impacts on the mental health of populations. Social media analysis might be used to try to understand people’s emotional state by using social media messages to provide real-time data.
In this systematic review, the authors searched for studies of using social media data for mental health surveillance and the techniques used for determining mental health using social media data during disasters. They restricted their searches to articles published in English since 1 January 2009 and did the search in November 2018. They included 18 studies, which were from France (2 studies), Germany (1), Japan (2), Mexico (1), the Netherlands (1), South Korea (1) and USA (9).
What was found: Analysis of language use and emotions from social media can predict several mental health problems.
The included studies relied mostly on messages from Twitter and used either machine learning models or lexicons in their analyses.
A variety of methods have been used to analyse social media data during disasters and the performance of any method depends upon factors such as the disaster size, the volume of data, disaster setting and the disaster web environment.
Implications: The authors of the review recommended social media analysis be used during disasters to provide more timely psychological support to build resilience in the affected population. They stated that further research, incorporating image and social network analysis along with social media texts, would lead to more reliable findings.
Other considerations: The authors of the review did not discuss their findings in the context of issues relating to health equity.
This summary was prepared by Joly Ghanawi, checked by Yasmeen Saeed, and finalized by Mike Clarke.