Identifying emerging mental illness utilizing search engine activity: A feasibility study

Digital Technology in Psychiatry: Survey Study of Clinicians

BACKGROUND

Digital technology has the potential to transform psychiatry, but its adoption has been limited. The proliferation of telepsychiatry during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urgency of optimizing technology for clinical practice. Understanding clinician attitudes and preferences is crucial to effective implementation and patient benefit.

OBJECTIVE

Our objective was to elicit clinician perspectives on emerging digital technology.

METHODS

Clinicians in a large psychiatry department (inpatient and outpatient) were invited to complete a web-based survey about their attitudes toward digital technology in practice, focusing on implementation, clinical benefits, and expectations about patients' attitudes. The survey consisted of 23 questions that could be answered on either a 3-point or 5-point Likert scale. We report the frequencies and percentages of responses.

RESULTS

In total, 139 clinicians completed the survey-they represent a variety of years of experience, credentials, and diagnostic subspecialties (response rate 69.5%). Overall, 83.4% (n=116) of them stated that digital data could improve their practice, and 23.0% (n=32) of responders reported that they had viewed patients' profiles on social media. Among anticipated benefits, clinicians rated symptom self-tracking (n=101, 72.7%) as well as clinical intervention support (n=90, 64.7%) as most promising. Among anticipated challenges, clinicians mostly expressed concerns over greater time demand (n=123, 88.5%) and whether digital data would be actionable (n=107, 77%). Furthermore, 95.0% (n=132) of clinicians expected their patients to share digital data.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, clinicians reported a positive attitude toward the use of digital data to not only improve patient outcomes but also highlight significant barriers that implementation would need to overcome. Although clinicians' self-reported attitudes about digital technology may not necessarily translate into behavior, our results suggest that technologies that reduce clinician burden and are easily interpretable have the greatest likelihood of uptake.

An evaluation of Internet searches as a marker of trends in population mental health in the US

The absence of continuous, real-time mental health assessment has made it challenging to quantify the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on population mental health. We examined publicly available, anonymized, aggregated data on weekly trends in Google searches related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation from 2018 to 2020 in the US. We correlated these trends with (1) emergency department (ED) visits for mental health problems and suicide attempts, and (2) surveys of self-reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, and mental health care use. Search queries related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation decreased sharply around March 2020, returning to pre-pandemic levels by summer 2020. Searches related to depression were correlated with the proportion of individuals reporting receiving therapy (r = 0.73), taking medication (r = 0.62) and having unmet mental healthcare needs (r = 0.57) on US Census Household Pulse Survey and modestly correlated with rates of ED visits for mental health conditions. Results were similar when considering instead searches for anxiety. Searches for suicidal ideation did not correlate with external variables. These results suggest aggregated data on Internet searches can provide timely and continuous insights into population mental health and complement other existing tools in this domain.

The Quality of Internet Websites for People Experiencing Psychosis: Pilot Expert Assessment

Background

Clinicians need to be able to assess the quality of the available information to aid clinical decision-making. The internet has become an important source of health information for consumers and their families.

Objective

This study aimed to rate the quality of websites with psychosis-related information (to provide clinicians with a basis for recommending material to guide clinical decision-making with consumers and their families), using a validated instrument as well as a purpose-developed checklist, and consider improvement in quality over a 4-year period.

Methods

Two measures of website quality were used: the DISCERN scale and the Psychosis Website Quality Checklist (PWQC). Terms related to psychosis, including “psychotic,” “psychosis,” “schizophrenia,” “delusion,” and “hallucination,” were entered into Google, and the first 25 results were analyzed. In total, 6 raters with varying health professional backgrounds were used to evaluate the websites across two time points: January-March 2014 and January-March 2018.

Results

Of the 25 websites rated, only the 6 highest ranked websites achieved a DISCERN score, indicating that they were of “good” quality (51-62 out of a possible 75), while the mean score of the websites (mean 43.96, SD 12.08) indicated an overall “fair” quality. The PWQC revealed that websites scored highly on “availability and usability” (mean 16.82, SD 3.96) but poorly on “credibility” (mean 20.99, SD 6.68), “currency” (mean 5.16, SD 2.62), and “breadth and accuracy” (mean 77.87, SD 23.20). Most sites lacked information about early intervention, recreational drug use and suicide risk, with little change in content over time. Stating an editorial or review process on the website (found in 56% of websites) was significantly associated with a higher quality score on both scales (the DISCERN scale, P=.002; the PWQC, P=.006).

Conclusions

The information on the internet available for clinicians to recommend to people affected by psychosis tended to be of “fair” quality. While higher-quality websites exist, it is generally not easy way to assess this on face value. Evidence of an editorial or review process was one indicator of website quality. While sites generally provided basic clinical information, most lacked material addressing weighing up risks and benefits of medication and alternatives, the role of coercive treatment and other more contentious issues. Insufficient emphasis is placed on detailed information on early intervention and importance of lifestyle modifications or how families and friends can contribute. These are likely to be the very answers that consumers and carers are seeking and this gap contributes to unmet needs among this group. We suggest that clinicians should be aware of what is available and where there are gaps.

Predicting subjective well-being in a high-risk sample of Russian mental health app users

Despite recent achievements in predicting personality traits and some other human psychological features with digital traces, prediction of subjective well-being (SWB) appears to be a relatively new task with few solutions. COVID-19 pandemic has added both a stronger need for rapid SWB screening and new opportunities for it, with online mental health applications gaining popularity and accumulating large and diverse user data. Nevertheless, the few existing works so far have aimed at predicting SWB, and have done so only in terms of Diener's Satisfaction with Life Scale. None of them analyzes the scale developed by the World Health Organization, known as WHO-5 - a widely accepted tool for screening mental well-being and, specifically, for depression risk detection. Moreover, existing research is limited to English-speaking populations, and tend to use text, network and app usage types of data separately. In the current work, we cover these gaps by predicting both mentioned SWB scales on a sample of Russian mental health app users who represent a population with high risk of mental health problems. In doing so, we employ a unique combination of phone application usage data with private messaging and networking digital traces from VKontakte, the most popular social media platform in Russia. As a result, we predict Diener's SWB scale with the state-of-the-art quality, introduce the first predictive models for WHO-5, with similar quality, and reach high accuracy in the prediction of clinically meaningful classes of the latter scale. Moreover, our feature analysis sheds light on the interrelated nature of the two studied scales: they are both characterized by negative sentiment expressed in text messages and by phone application usage in the morning hours, confirming some previous findings on subjective well-being manifestations. At the same time, SWB measured by Diener's scale is reflected mostly in lexical features referring to social and affective interactions, while mental well-being is characterized by objective features that reflect physiological functioning, circadian rhythms and somatic conditions, thus saliently demonstrating the underlying theoretical differences between the two scales.

Detecting Suicide Ideation in the Era of Social Media: The Population Neuroscience Perspective

Social media platforms are increasingly used across many population groups not only to communicate and consume information, but also to express symptoms of psychological distress and suicidal thoughts. The detection of suicidal ideation (SI) can contribute to suicide prevention. Twitter data suggesting SI have been associated with negative emotions (e.g., shame, sadness) and a number of geographical and ecological variables (e.g., geographic location, environmental stress). Other important research contributions on SI come from studies in neuroscience. To date, very few research studies have been conducted that combine different disciplines (epidemiology, health geography, neurosciences, psychology, and social media big data science), to build innovative research directions on this topic. This article aims to offer a new interdisciplinary perspective, that is, a Population Neuroscience perspective on SI in order to highlight new ways in which multiple scientific fields interact to successfully investigate emotions and stress in social media to detect SI in the population. We argue that a Population Neuroscience perspective may help to better understand the mechanisms underpinning SI and to promote more effective strategies to prevent suicide timely and at scale.

Social Semiotics of Gangstalking Evidence Videos on YouTube: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of a Novel Persecutory Belief System

BACKGROUND

Gangstalking refers to a novel persecutory belief system wherein sufferers believe that they are being followed, watched, and harassed by a vast network of people in their community who have been recruited as complicit perpetrators. They are frequently diagnosed as mentally ill, although they reject this formulation. Those affected by this belief system self-identify as targeted individuals (TIs). They seek to prove the veracity of their persecution and dispute the notion that they are mentally ill by posting videos online that purport to provide evidence of their claims.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of the study was to characterize the multimodal social semiotic practices used in gangstalking evidence videos.

METHODS

We assembled a group of 50 evidence videos posted on YouTube by self-identified TIs and performed a multimodal social semiotic discourse analysis using a grounded theory approach to data analysis.

RESULTS

TIs accomplished several social and interpersonal tasks in the videos. They constructed their own identity as subjects of persecution and refuted the notion that they suffered from mental illness. They also cultivated positive ambient affiliation with viewers of the videos but manifested hostility toward people who appeared in the videos. They made extensive use of multimodal deixis to generate salience and construe the gangstalking belief system. The act of filming itself was a source of conflict and served as a self-fulfilling prophecy; filming was undertaken to neutrally record hostility directed toward video bloggers (vloggers). However, the act of filming precipitated the very behaviors that they set out to document. Finally, the act of filming was also regarded as an act of resistance and empowerment by vloggers.

CONCLUSIONS

These data provide insight into a novel persecutory belief system. Interpersonal concerns are important for people affected, and they construe others as either sympathetic or hostile. They create positive ambient affiliation with viewers. We found that vloggers use multimodal deixis to illustrate the salience of the belief system. The videos highlighted the Derridean concept of différance, wherein the meaning of polysemous signifiers is deferred without definitive resolution. This may be important in communicating with people and patients with persecutory belief systems. Clinicians may consider stepping away from the traditional true/false dichotomy endorsed by psychiatric classification systems and focus on the ambiguity in semiotic systems generally and in persecutory belief systems specifically.