A Study of Social Media Behaviors and Mental Health Wellbeing from a Privacy Perspective

摘要

Mental healthcare services are insufficient under the current circumstances due to growing populations with mental health issues, the lack of enough mental health professionals, services, and programs that are needed. Traditional methods are often time consuming, expensive, and not timely. At the same time an increasingly number of people are using social media to interact with others and to share their personal stories and reflections. In this study we examined if online users' social media activities were influenced by their mental well-being. To carry out this research we assessed Twitter activities between participants that reported high symptoms of depression and those with lower or no symptoms of depression. Our results confirm the influence in their activities in addition to interesting insights. We believe these findings can be beneficial to mental health care providers if users' privacy is preserved.