Discussion of Mental Illness and Mental Health By NBA Players on Twitter

Abstract

In 2019, the National Basketball Association (NBA) expanded it's mental health rules to include mandating that each team have at least one mental health professional on their full-time staff and to retain a licensed psychiatrist to assist when needed. In this work, we investigate the NBA players' discussion of mental health using historical data from players' public Twitter accounts. All current and former NBA players with Twitter accounts were identified, and each of their last 800 tweets were scraped, yielding 920,000 tweets. A list of search terms derived from the DSM5 diagnoses was then created and used to search all of the nearly one million tweets. In this work, we present the most common search terms used to identify tweets about mental health, present the change in month-by-month tweets about mental health, and identify the impact of players discussing their own mental health struggles on their box score statistics before and after their first tweet discussing their own mental health struggles.