"I can't get no sleep"

Abstract

Emerging research has shown that social media services are being used as tools to disclose a range of personal health information. To explore the role of social media in the discussion of mental health issues, and with particular reference to insomnia and sleep disorders, a corpus of 18,901 messages -or Tweets -posted to the microblogging social media service Twitter were analysed using a mixed methods approach. We present a content analysis which revealed that Tweets that contained the word "insomnia" contained significantly more negative health information than a random sample, strongly suggesting that individuals were making disclosures about their sleep disorder. A subsequent thematic analysis then revealed two themes: coping with insomnia, and describing the experience of insomnia. We discuss these themes as well as the implications of our research for those in the interaction design community interested in integrating online social media systems in health interventions.

Researching Mental Health Disorders in the Era of Social Media: Systematic Review

“…Eating disorder was explored by Chancellor et al [29], Coppersmith et al [40], and Prieto et al [56]. Attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia were examined by Coppersmith et al [40], and sleep disorder was studied by Jamison-Powell et al [70]. None of the included studies explored phobias or panic disorders.…”

“…Of the studies included in this review, 31 analyzed social network contents written in English [24-31,33-35,40-46,49, 50,52,53,58-60,65-68,70,71]; 11 studies investigated Chinese text [32,37,39,48,51,54,55,57,62,63,69]; 2 focused on Korean [36,61] and 2 on Japanese text [38,64], 1 looked at Turkish content [47], and 1 jointly at Spanish and Portuguese [56]. …”

“…Facebook-based experiments gathered user datasets by developing custom tools or Web apps connecting to the Facebook application programming interfaces (APIs) [36,50,61]. Another group of studies used Twitter APIs to explore cues for mental disorders [24-27,30,31,33,35,38,47,52,53,56-60,64-68, 70,71]. A similar approach was used for Instagram APIs [29] and Sina Weibo APIs [32,37,39,51,54,55,57,62,63].…”

“…As part of the data cleaning process, each post was checked for the majority written language (eg, contained at least 70% English words [28,40,42,53,59,70]). This ensured that the available tools were suitable to analyze the posts.…”

A Conceptual Framework for the Mining and Analysis of the Social Media Data

“…A few studies have been done on mining the social media data on healthcare e.g., Jamison-Powel et al [16] did a study by mining and analysing data from Twitter to discover how individuals are utilizing social media to deliberate on their mental health conditions, in particular reference to insomnia. Social media content has also been mined and analysed to promote marketing and businesses [17].…”