Mental health discourse and social media: Which mechanisms of cultural power drive discourse on Twitter

Alina Pavlova and Pauwke Berkers

Social Science & Medicine, 2020, vol. 263, issue C

Abstract: The global burden of mental health disorders has increased steadily during the past decade. Today, mental illness is the leading cause of total years lived with disability. At the same time, global mental health policies and budgets fall short of addressing the societal burden as mental health discourse languishes in the shadows due to stigma. As social media have become an increasingly popular source of information, they create opportunities as well as threats for mental health discourse. On the one hand, social media can help to bring awareness to stigmatized topics as they give marginalized members of society the possibility to share experiences and voice their discontent. On the other hand, mental health discourse on social media may lead to stigmatization. To date, little is known about social media mental health discourse and what drives it. This study addresses these research gaps by (1) mapping the mental health discourse on Twitter and (2) analyzing mechanisms of cultural power through which some mental health topics take prevalence over the others. Drawing on Twitter data, this research employs innovative methods of topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and panel data regression analyses. Theoretically, it combines, in a multidisciplinary fashion, concepts such as emotional energy and cognitive focus from sociology and bandwagon behavior from economics. Our findings show that low-cost attention mechanisms are ineffective in fostering online mental health discourse, whereas emotional energy and discursive variability have a positive influence by engaging audiences, creating online solidarity, and speaking to worldviews of audiences from different walks of life. Social media mental health discourse is also shown to be quite diverse and more stigma-neutral than such discourse in traditional media.

Keywords: Mental health; Discourse analysis; Social media; Cultural power; Stigma; Topic modeling; Cognitive-emotional currents; Emotional energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362030469X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:263:y:2020:i:c:s027795362030469x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113250

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().