Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Feb 4, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 5, 2018 - Jul 21, 2018
Date Accepted: Jul 21, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Text Mining Mental Health Reports for Issues Impacting Today’s College Students: Qualitative Study
Background:
A growing number of college students are experiencing personal circumstances or encountering situations that feel overwhelming and negatively affect their academic studies and other aspects of life on campus. To meet this growing demand for counseling services, US colleges and universities are offering a growing variety of mental health services that provide support and services to students in distress.
Objective:
In this study, we explore mental health issues impacting college students using a corpus of news articles, foundation reports, and media stories. Mental health concerns within this population have been on the rise. Uncovering the most salient themes articulated in current news and literature reports can better enable higher education institutions to provide health services to its students.
Methods:
We used SAS Text Miner to analyze 165 references that were published from 2010 to 2015 and focused on mental health among college students. Key clusters were identified to reveal the themes that were most significant to the topic.
Results:
The final cluster analysis yielded six themes in students’ mental health experiences in higher education (ie, age, race, crime, student services, aftermath, victim). Two themes, increasing demand for student services provided by campus counseling centers (113/165, 68.5%) and the increased mental health risks faced by racial and ethnic minorities (30/165, 18.2%), dominated the discourse.
Conclusions:
Higher education institutions are actively engaged in extending mental health services and offering targeted outreach to students of color. Cluster analysis identified that institutions are devoting more and innovative resources in response to the growing number students who experience mental health concerns. However, there is a need to focus on proactive approaches to mitigate the causes of mental health and the aftermath of a negative experience, particularly violence and sexual assault. Such strategies can potentially influence how students navigate their health information seeking and how information and communication technologies, including mobile apps, can partially address the needs of college students.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.