Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice
By John A. Naslund, Ameya P. Bondre, John B. Torous, Kelly A. Aschbrenner. Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 2020
607 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social media platforms are popular venues for sharing personal experiences, seeking information, and offering peer-to-peer support among individuals living with mental illness. With significant shortfalls in the availability, quality, and reach of evidence-based mental health services across the United States and globally, social media platforms may afford new opportunities to bridge this gap. However, caution is warranted, as numerous studies highlight risks of social media use for mental health. In this commentary, we consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services. Specifically, we summarize current research on the use of social media among mental health service users, and early efforts using social media for the delivery of evidence-based programs. We also review the risks, potential harms, and necessary safety precautions with using social media for mental health. To conclude, we explore opportunities using data science and machine learning, for example by leveraging social media for detecting mental disorders and developing predictive models aimed at characterizing the aetiology and progression of mental disorders. These various efforts using social media, as summarized in this commentary, hold promise for improving the lives of individuals living with mental disorders.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Health, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e2eaf6dd4cdf713a8c4616007468aff3bdb0166
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Citations in the corpus
- Community-level Research on Suicidality Prediction in a Secure Environment: Overview of the CLPsych 2021 Shared Task (2021, background): “Naslund et al. (2020) and Lee et al. (2021) provide overviews that include thoughtful, big-picture commentary on research and clinical applications for mental health taking advantage of NLP, machine learning, and social media.”