Behind the Hashtag: Online Disclosure of Mental Illness and Community Response on Tumblr

Abstract

People with mental illness may disclose information on social media to build social capital.• Mental health disclosures included themes of emotions, interpersonal loss, and change.• Disclosure frequency increased with community responses in interaction with diagnosis.• Community responses varied as a function of mental health diagnosis disclosed.

Tumblr Facts: Antecedents of Self-Disclosure across Different Social Networking Sites

“…For instance, Hawkins and Haimson [ 31 ] pointed out that Tumblr may create novel opportunities for trans people to combat widespread violence and stigmatization, possibly enhancing positive mental health benefits in three ways: (1) as a therapeutic outlet to discuss emotions throughout the transition process; (2) as a place to observe others’ transition-related content; and (3) as a way to interact with and positively impact others. Such a finding is consistent with Griffith and Stein [ 10 ]. In addition to confirming that posting content on Tumblr is often considered therapeutic on its own accord (regardless of interactions with others), these authors showed that Tumblr communities could be quite active in supporting their members’ mental health disclosures.…”

“…This bias seems particularly relevant, considering that previous contributions highlighted that the characteristics and affordances of a medium are not background elements, but can define in unexpected ways how it will be used and which users will find it suitable for their intentions [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. According to Griffith and Stein [ 10 ], each SNS has its own reputation based on branding and self-selected user communities, meaning that the same person could tend to select different SNSs for different uses. That could explain why 98% of users who are active on a social platform are also active at least on one other SNS [ 11 ].…”

“…According to Yoder et al [ 23 ], Tumblr’s scholarship can roughly be divided into computational research (including network analysis, recommendation systems, and search tools to identify relevant or problematic content) and social–scientific approaches. Among this second line of research, the most-studied topics are mental health, sexuality, and other identity issues—as well as their intersection with media, culture, and fandom [ 8 , 10 , 12 , 26 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. In addition, many studies also emphasized its affordances for marginalized groups—such as LGBTQ+ communities—to explore and construct their own identities, also challenging dominant binary conceptions of gender and sexuality in a context that felt much safer than mainstream and identity-bound media [ 7 , 21 , 31 ].…”

“…Anyway, in most cases, the research mentioned above employed qualitative methods like semi-structured interviews [ 21 ] and analysis of posts’ content [ 7 , 10 ], focalizing specifically on users from particular communities. To the authors’ knowledge, just a single study employed quantitative methods for investigating psychological variables in the general population [ 6 ].…”

“…Hollenbaugh and Ferris [ 58 ] found a negative impact of self-esteem on the breadth of self-disclosure on Facebook. Recently, Griffith and Stein [ 10 ] examined personal disclosures about mental illness and the responses of online community members among public blog posts of 14,626 Tumblr users, highlighting a significant interaction effect on mental health disclosure frequency and community responses. Although the content of most examined personal disclosures was related to users’ emotions and cognitions about their mental health and feelings of interpersonal loss and change over time, the authors found some differences in online hashtag communities according to the specific level of activity in both posting and commenting and the percentage of question indicators included in the post.…”