Areas of Interest and Attitudes towards the Pharmacological Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Thematic and Quantitative Analysis Using Twitter

Abstract

We focused on tweets containing hashtags related to ADHD pharmacotherapy between 20 September and 31 October 2019. Tweets were classified as to whether they described medical issues or not. Tweets with medical content were classified according to the topic they referred to: side effects, efficacy, or adherence. Furthermore, we classified any links included within a tweet as either scientific or non-scientific. We created a dataset of 6568 tweets: 4949 (75.4%) related to stimulants, 605 (9.2%) to non-stimulants and 1014 (15.4%) to alpha-2 agonists. Next, we manually analyzed 1810 tweets. In the end, 481 (48%) of the tweets in the stimulant group, 218 (71.9%) in the non-stimulant group and 162 (31.9%) in the alpha agonist group were considered classifiable. Stimulants accumulated the majority of tweets. Notably, the content that generated the highest frequency of tweets was that related to treatment efficacy, with alpha-2 agonist-related tweets accumulating the highest proportion of positive consideration. We found the highest percentages of tweets with scientific links in those posts related to alpha-2 agonists. Stimulant-related tweets obtained the highest proportion of likes and were the most disseminated within the Twitter community. Understanding the public view of these medications is necessary to design promotional strategies aimed at the appropriate population.

Areas of Interest and Social Consideration of Antidepressants on English Tweets: A Natural Language Processing Classification Study

“…Research conducted so far analyses beliefs and attitude towards illnesses in social media. Several types of diseases have been compared, such as heart diseases with cancer, and, specifically in mental illness, eating disorders, bipolar disorder and, more frequently, schizophrenia, that has been compared with depression or diabetes, where trivialization is not very likely [31,40,[72][73][74][75][76][77]. This research found that stigmatizing attitudes towards mental illnesses were more frequent when considering bipolar disorder among mental illnesses in general, and more frequent in schizophrenia than in depression or in other medical conditions.…”

“…These analyses also enable a better understanding of the views of non-patient individuals and include those of patients reluctant to go to a healthcare professional [26][27][28]. It is also noteworthy that conversations in social media take place in a more informal and spontaneous environment than the ones that take place during an appointment with a professional, so they are more likely to show true beliefs [29][30][31].…”

Analyzing Psychotherapy on Twitter: An 11-Year Analysis of Tweets From Major U.S. Media Outlets

“…For example, a previous study reported that liraglutide and semaglutide were rated as effective for treating obesity by 59.1 and 79.1% respectively from among the Twitter users discussing this topic ( 36 ). In another study that analyzed Twitter posts mentioning drugs used to treat ADHD, it was found that between 54.1 and 74.1% of the users who posted on this topic gave a positive assessment of their efficacy ( 37 ).…”

Assessment of beliefs and attitudes about electroconvulsive therapy posted on Twitter: An observational study

“…When discussing this study in the context of previous research on mental health topics on Twitter, it is noted that the total amount of retrieved publications for ECT is lower than the amount of retrieved tweets in other studies related to other treatments for mental disorders including antipsychotics, antidepressants, and medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [27, 28, 34]. They are even lower in amount than tweets for nonpsychiatric disorders, such as statins, medications for obesity, chemotherapy agents, or antibiotics [24, 34–36].…”