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Anjali, B RK. Exploring cause-specific strategies for suicide prevention in India: A multivariate VARMA approach. Asian J Psychiatr 2024; 92:103871. [PMID: 38160524 DOI: 10.1016/j.ajp.2023.103871] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/12/2023] [Revised: 11/30/2023] [Accepted: 12/13/2023] [Indexed: 01/03/2024]
Abstract
Efficiently predicting suicide rates aids resource allocation and response preparedness. This study investigates time-series data with multiple variables to model and forecast suicide events in India. Utilizing official suicide statistics (2001-2021), results highlight the superiority of the multivariate VARMA model over VAR and univariate ARIMA models. This approach uncovers overlooked patterns and a concerning upward trend in future Indian suicide incidents. The research provides insights that aid public health professionals in targeting high-need areas and enhancing readiness and suggests cause-specific preventive strategies to counter this trend.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anjali
- Department of Mathematics, School of Advanced Sciences, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore 632014, Tamil Nadu, India
| | - Rushi Kumar B
- Department of Mathematics, School of Advanced Sciences, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore 632014, Tamil Nadu, India.
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Wang S, Ning H, Huang X, Xiao Y, Zhang M, Yang EF, Sadahiro Y, Liu Y, Li Z, Hu T, Fu X, Li Z, Zeng Y. Public Surveillance of Social Media for Suicide Using Advanced Deep Learning Models in Japan: Time Series Study From 2012 to 2022. J Med Internet Res 2023; 25:e47225. [PMID: 37267022 DOI: 10.2196/47225] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/12/2023] [Revised: 04/12/2023] [Accepted: 05/09/2023] [Indexed: 06/03/2023] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Social media platforms have been increasingly used to express suicidal thoughts, feelings, and acts, raising public concerns over time. A large body of literature has explored the suicide risks identified by people's expressions on social media. However, there is not enough evidence to conclude that social media provides public surveillance for suicide without aligning suicide risks detected on social media with actual suicidal behaviors. Corroborating this alignment is a crucial foundation for suicide prevention and intervention through social media and for estimating and predicting suicide in countries with no reliable suicide statistics. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to corroborate whether the suicide risks identified on social media align with actual suicidal behaviors. This aim was achieved by tracking suicide risks detected by 62 million tweets posted in Japan over a 10-year period and assessing the locational and temporal alignment of such suicide risks with actual suicide behaviors recorded in national suicide statistics. METHODS This study used a human-in-the-loop approach to identify suicide-risk tweets posted in Japan from January 2013 to December 2022. This approach involved keyword-filtered data mining, data scanning by human efforts, and data refinement via an advanced natural language processing model termed Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The tweet-identified suicide risks were then compared with actual suicide records in both temporal and spatial dimensions to validate if they were statistically correlated. RESULTS Twitter-identified suicide risks and actual suicide records were temporally correlated by month in the 10 years from 2013 to 2022 (correlation coefficient=0.533; P<.001); this correlation coefficient is higher at 0.652 when we advanced the Twitter-identified suicide risks 1 month earlier to compare with the actual suicide records. These 2 indicators were also spatially correlated by city with a correlation coefficient of 0.699 (P<.001) for the 10-year period. Among the 267 cities with the top quintile of suicide risks identified from both tweets and actual suicide records, 73.5% (n=196) of cities overlapped. In addition, Twitter-identified suicide risks were at a relatively lower level after midnight compared to a higher level in the afternoon, as well as a higher level on Sundays and Saturdays compared to weekdays. CONCLUSIONS Social media platforms provide an anonymous space where people express their suicidal thoughts, ideation, and acts. Such expressions can serve as an alternative source to estimating and predicting suicide in countries without reliable suicide statistics. It can also provide real-time tracking of suicide risks, serving as an early warning for suicide. The identification of areas where suicide risks are highly concentrated is crucial for location-based mental health planning, enabling suicide prevention and intervention through social media in a spatially and temporally explicit manner.
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Affiliation(s)
- Siqin Wang
- Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
- School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
- School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
| | - Huan Ning
- Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States
| | - Xiao Huang
- Department of Geosciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, United States
| | - Yunyu Xiao
- Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, United States
| | - Mengxi Zhang
- Carilion School of Medicine, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, United States
| | - Ellie Fan Yang
- School of Communication and Mass Media, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, MO, United States
| | - Yukio Sadahiro
- Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
| | - Yan Liu
- School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
| | - Zhenlong Li
- Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States
| | - Tao Hu
- Department of Geography, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, United States
| | - Xiaokang Fu
- Centre for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
| | - Zi Li
- Graduate School of Medicine, Juntendo University, Tokyo, Japan
| | - Ye Zeng
- Department of Medical Business, Nihon Pharmaceutical University, Tokyo, Japan
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Perez C, Karmakar S. An NLP-assisted Bayesian time-series analysis for prevalence of Twitter cyberbullying during the COVID-19 pandemic. SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND MINING 2023; 13:51. [PMID: 36937491 PMCID: PMC10016178 DOI: 10.1007/s13278-023-01053-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/22/2022] [Revised: 02/19/2023] [Accepted: 02/24/2023] [Indexed: 03/17/2023]
Abstract
COVID-19 has brought about many changes in social dynamics. Stay-at-home orders and disruptions in school teaching can influence bullying behavior in-person and online, both of which leading to negative outcomes in victims. To study cyberbullying specifically, 1 million tweets containing keywords associated with abuse were collected from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2021 with the Twitter API search endpoint. A natural language processing model pre-trained on a Twitter corpus generated probabilities for the tweets being offensive and hateful. To overcome limitations of sampling, data were also collected using the count endpoint. The fraction of tweets from a given daily sample marked as abusive is multiplied to the number reported by the count endpoint. Once these adjusted counts are assembled, a Bayesian autoregressive Poisson model allows one to study the mean trend and lag functions of the data and how they vary over time. The results reveal strong weekly and yearly seasonality in hateful speech but with slight differences across years that may be attributed to COVID-19.
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Affiliation(s)
- Christopher Perez
- Department of Statistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32601 USA
| | - Sayar Karmakar
- Department of Statistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32601 USA
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Niu Q, Liu J, Zhao Z, Onishi M, Kawaguchi A, Bandara A, Harada K, Aoyama T, Nagai-Tanima M. Explanation of hand, foot, and mouth disease cases in Japan using Google Trends before and during the COVID-19: infodemiology study. BMC Infect Dis 2022; 22:806. [PMID: 36309663 PMCID: PMC9617033 DOI: 10.1186/s12879-022-07790-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/30/2022] [Accepted: 10/19/2022] [Indexed: 11/11/2022] Open
Abstract
Background Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affects common diseases, but its impact on hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) is unclear. Google Trends data is beneficial for approximate real-time statistics and because of ease in access, is expected to be used for infection explanation from an information-seeking behavior perspective. We aimed to explain HFMD cases before and during COVID-19 using Google Trends. Methods HFMD cases were obtained from the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and Google search data from 2009 to 2021 in Japan were downloaded from Google Trends. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated between HFMD cases and the search topic “HFMD” from 2009 to 2021. Japanese tweets containing “HFMD” were retrieved to select search terms for further analysis. Search terms with counts larger than 1000 and belonging to ranges of infection sources, susceptible sites, susceptible populations, symptoms, treatment, preventive measures, and identified diseases were retained. Cross-correlation analyses were conducted to detect lag changes between HFMD cases and search terms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple linear regressions with backward elimination processing were used to identify the most significant terms for HFMD explanation. Results HFMD cases and Google search volume peaked around July in most years, excluding 2020 and 2021. The search topic “HFMD” presented strong correlations with HFMD cases, except in 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred. In addition, the differences in lags for 73 (72.3%) search terms were negative, which might indicate increasing public awareness of HFMD infections during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of multiple linear regression demonstrated that significant search terms contained the same meanings but expanded informative search content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions The significant terms for the explanation of HFMD cases before and during COVID-19 were different. Awareness of HFMD infections in Japan may have improved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Continuous monitoring is important to promote public health and prevent resurgence. The public interest reflected in information-seeking behavior can be helpful for public health surveillance. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12879-022-07790-9.
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Matsumoto R, Kawano Y, Motomura E, Shiroyama T, Okada M. Analyzing the changing relationship between personal consumption and suicide mortality during COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, using governmental and personal consumption transaction databases. Front Public Health 2022; 10:982341. [PMID: 36159241 PMCID: PMC9489934 DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.982341] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/30/2022] [Accepted: 08/15/2022] [Indexed: 01/25/2023] Open
Abstract
During the early stages of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, suicides did not increase in most countries/regions. Japan, however, was an exception to this, reporting increased numbers of female suicides with no changes in male suicide. To explore the trends of increasing suicides, the fluctuations of personal consumption (as an indicator of lifestyle) and standardized suicide death rate (SDR) disaggregated by age, sex, and prefecture, were determined using a linear mixed-effect model. Additionally, fixed effects of personal consumption on SDR during the pandemic were also analyzed using hierarchical linear regression models with robust standard errors. During the first wave of the pandemic, SDR for both sexes decreased slightly but increased during the second half of 2020. SDR of females younger than 70 years old and males younger than 40 years old continued to increase throughout 2021, whereas SDR for other ages of both sexes did not increase. Personal consumption expenditures on out-of-home recreations (travel agencies, pubs, and hotels) and internet/mobile communication expenses decreased, but expenditures on home-based recreations (contents distribution) increased during the pandemic. Increased expenditures on internet/mobile communication were related to increasing SDR of both sexes. Increasing expenditures on content distributions were related to increasing females' SDR without affecting that of males. Decreasing expenditures on pubs were related to increasing SDR of both sexes in the non-metropolitan region. These findings suggest that transformed individual lifestyles, extended time at home with a decreased outing for contact with others, contributed to the progression of isolation as a risk of suicide. Unexpectedly, increasing compensatory contact with others using internet/mobile communication enhanced isolation resulting in increased suicide risk.
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