Our new article titled “The times, they are a-changin’: tracking the shifts in mental health signals in Australia from the early to later phase of the COVID-19 pandemic” has been accepted for publication by BMJ Global Health (Impact Factor: 5.558).
—-Abstract—-
Introduction
Widespread problems of psychological distress have been observed in many countries following the outbreak of COVID-19, including Australia. What is lacking from current scholarship is a national-scale assessment that tracks the shifts in mental health during the pandemic timeline and across geographic contexts.
Methods
Drawing on 244,406 geotagged tweets in Australia from January 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021, we employed machine learning and spatial mapping techniques to classify, measure, and map changes in the Australian public’s mental health signals, and track their change across the different phases of the pandemic in eight Australian capital cities.
Results
Australians’ mental health signals, quantified by sentiment scores, have a shift from pessimistic (early pandemic) to optimistic (middle pandemic), reflected by a 174.1% [95% CI: 154.8, 194.5] increase in sentiment scores. However, the signals progressively recessed towards a more pessimistic outlook (later pandemic) with a decrease in sentiment scores by 48.8% [34.7, 64.9]. Such changes in mental health signals vary across capital cities.
Conclusion
We set out a novel empirical framework using social media to systematically classify, measure, map, and track the mental health of a nation. Our approach is designed in a manner that can readily be augmented into an ongoing monitoring capacity and extended to other nations. Tracking locales where people are displaying elevated levels of pessimistic mental health signals provide important information for the smart deployment of finite mental health services. This is especially critical in a time of crisis during which resources are stretched beyond normal bounds.
