Changes in suicide-related tweets before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in France : The importance of social media monitoring in public health prediction

Introduction

The COVID-19 pan­de­mic impac­ted men­tal health, as demons­tra­ted by nume­rous stu­dies. In recent years, espe­cial­ly during the pan­de­mic, the use of social net­works, inclu­ding Twit­ter, increa­sed. This sug­gests that this media could help with men­tal health moni­to­ring, as attes­ted by pre­vious studies.

Method

We conduc­ted a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­na­ry stu­dy on French tweets that were pos­ted bet­ween Janua­ry 1, 2019, and Decem­ber 31, 2021. We selec­ted the tweets via the Twit­ter API (Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face) using five key­words rela­ting to sui­cide : want to die, sui­ci­dal idea­tion, com­mit sui­cide, sui­ci­dal, and sui­cide attempt. A word fre­quen­cy ana­ly­sis was per­for­med, and the data were com­pa­red with the num­ber of emer­gen­cy visits for sui­ci­dal idea­tion before and during the COVID-19 pan­de­mic as recor­ded by the French natio­nal sui­cide observatory.

Results

We obser­ved that 189,005 tweets were rela­ted to sui­cide in 2019, 261,993 in 2020 (+38.62% of that obser­ved in 2019), and 301,177 in 2021 (+59.35% of that obser­ved in 2019). We also obser­ved an increase in the num­ber of tweets contai­ning control words in 2020 (+30.07% of that obser­ved in 2019), but in 2021, the num­ber almost fell back to the level of that in 2019 (+5.96% of that obser­ved in 2019). Fur­ther­more, the dif­fe­rence bet­ween both ratios (of sui­cide-rela­ted tweets and of tweets contai­ning control words) was most signi­fi­cant during the third lock­down. The change in the num­ber of sui­cide-rela­ted tweets fol­lo­wed a curve that over­lap­ped with the change in the num­ber of emer­gen­cy visits fol­lo­wing sui­ci­dal idea­tions, as repor­ted by the French natio­nal sui­cide obser­va­to­ry. In conclu­sion, Twit­ter can be an ade­quate and reliable tool for scree­ning for sui­ci­dal idea­tion in the gene­ral population.