Mental health problems and social media exposure during COVID-19 outbreak

By Junling Gao, P. Zheng, Yingnan Jia, Hao Chen, Yimeng Mao, Suhong Chen, Yi Wang, H. Fu, J. Dai. PLoS ONE, 2020

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Huge citizens expose to social media during a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbroke in Wuhan, China. We assess the prevalence of mental health problems and examine their association with social media exposure. A cross-sectional study among Chinese citizens aged≥18 years old was conducted during Jan 31 to Feb 2, 2020. Online survey was used to do rapid assessment. Total of 4872 participants from 31 provinces and autonomous regions were involved in the current study. Besides demographics and social media exposure (SME), depression was assessed by The Chinese version of WHO-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5) and anxiety was assessed by Chinese version of generalized anxiety disorder scale (GAD-7). multivariable logistic regressions were used to identify associations between social media exposure with mental health problems after controlling for covariates. The prevalence of depression, anxiety and combination of depression and anxiety (CDA) was 48.3% (95%CI: 46.9%-49.7%), 22.6% (95%CI: 21.4%-23.8%) and 19.4% (95%CI: 18.3%-20.6%) during COVID-19 outbroke in Wuhan, China. More than 80% (95%CI:80.9%-83.1%) of participants reported frequently exposed to social media. After controlling for covariates, frequently SME was positively associated with high odds of anxiety (OR = 1.72, 95%CI: 1.31–2.26) and CDA (OR = 1.91, 95%CI: 1.52–2.41) compared with less SME. Our findings show there are high prevalence of mental health problems, which positively associated with frequently SME during the COVID-19 outbreak. These findings implicated the government need pay more attention to mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety among general population and combating with “infodemic” while combating during public health emergency.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6352661273fcd34e64ee831c1033952c75f1bee

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Citations in the corpus

Prevalence of depression during the COVID-19 outbreak: A meta-analysis of community-based studies (2020, positive): “, 2020), poorer selfrated health status (Gao et al., 2020; Lei et al., 2020; Wang, Di, et al. 2020), and/or history of chronic illness (Mazza et al.”
Investigating the effect of national government physical distancing measures on depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic through meta-analysis and meta-regression (2020, neutral): “…Hui, & Wan, 2020; Civantos et al., 2020; Consolo, Bellini, Bencivenni, Iani, & Checchi, 2020; Fancourt, Steptoe, & Bu, 2020; Filho et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2020; Guo et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2020; Islam, Ferdous, & Potenza, 2020; Jia et al., 2020; Johnson, Ebrahimi, & Hoffart, 2020; Juanjuan…”
The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on child and adolescent mental health: systematic review (2021, background): “For instance, excessive COVID-19 media exposure has been associated with an increase in anxiety levels and stress [40].”
Prevalence of symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, posttraumatic stress disorder, and psychological distress among populations affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2020, neutral): “These prevalence rates are also higher than those usually observed in the general population (Atwoli et al., 2015; Dorrington et al., 2014; Grove et al., 2011; Guo et al., 2016; Kessler et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2017; Slade et al., 2011; Stein et al., 2017; Vilagut et al., 2016; Weinberger et al.,…”
Terror Management Theory and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “A recent study found that social media exposure during the pandemic is associated with poorer mental health as it likely contributes to the persistent salience of the virus and its mortality threat (Gao et al., 2020).”
Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the general population: A systematic review (2020, neutral): “…size Nonrespondents Ascertainments of exposure Based on design and analysis Assessment of outcome Statistical test Ahmed et al., 2020 6 * * ** * * Gao, 2020 6 * * ** * * González-Sanguino et al., 2020 4 * * * * Huang 2020 6 * * ** * * Lei et al., 2020 7 * * * ** * * Liu, 2020 8 * * * * ** * *…”