A Review of You Tube Content to Assess US Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Mental health concerns have increased in prevalence since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many turn to online resources for relevant information. The purpose of this study is to describe the availability of mental health information on YouTube, and to assess the relevance of the videos’ content in relation to the actual need of the population. The 100 most-watched YouTube videos in English resulting from a YouTube search of “COVID-19” and “mental health” were evaluated. Of mental health conditions, anxiety and depression were mentioned in over 50% of the videos. A positive correlation was found between videos that mentioned anxiety and those that mentioned depression ( p < 0.001). The numbers of videos focused on anxiety and depression were correlated with themes such as life stressors and social distancing ( p < 0.05). Videos that did not make recommendations for dealing with stressors had more positive ratings than videos that did make such recommendations ( p = 0.002). The content of YouTube videos addressing mental health issues during COVID-19 reflects the actual prevalence of specific mental health conditions during this same time period. Viewer ratings may be indicative of the public need for information about mental health conditions and validation for difficult experiences on social media sites. YouTube must be better utilized to disseminate information about mental illness.

Research and Public Interest in Mindfulness in the COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 Era: A Bibliometric and Google Trends Analysis

“…Our Google Trends analysis also found an increased public interest in mindfulness contents via YouTube since the middle of 2010. Some studies found a critical link between mental health and YouTube content during the COVID-19 pandemic [53,54]. Nevertheless, according to our bibliographic analysis, studies in this field do not seem to consider online platforms such as YouTube as an important research topic in the context of mindfulness research.…”

The Impact of YouTube on Loneliness and Mental Health

“…For example, higher levels of loneliness were reported to be associated with YouTube use [63,71] and vice versa [75]. However, there are concerns about YouTube's recommendation algorithms, which could better present safe and accurate information on suicide [66,70,72,73,83]. It may be perceived that previous systematic reviews weaken the potential originality of the current study.…”