JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The study of seasonal patterns of public interest in psychiatric disorders has important theoretical and practical implications for service planning and delivery. The recent explosion of Internet searches suggests that mining search databases yields unique information on public interest in mental health disorders—a significantly more affordable approach compared to population health studies.

Objective:

The present study aims to investigate seasonal patterns of Internet mental health queries in Ontario.

Methods:

Weekly data on health queries in Ontario from Google Trends were downloaded for a five-year period (2012-2017) for the terms “schizophrenia,” “autism,” “bipolar,” “depression,” “anxiety,” “OCD,” and “suicide.” Control terms were overall search results for the term “health” and the term “how.” Time series analyses using a continuous wavelet transform were performed to isolate seasonal components in the search volume for each term.

Results:

All mental health queries showed significant seasonal patterns with peak periodicity occurring over the winter months and troughs occurring during summer, except for “suicide.” The comparison term “health” also exhibited seasonal periodicity while the term “how” did not, indicating that general information seeking may not follow a seasonal trend in the way that mental health information seeking does.

Conclusions:

Seasonal patterns of Internet search volume in a wide range of mental health terms was observed, with the exception of “suicide.” Our study demonstrates that monitoring Internet search trends is an affordable, instantaneous and naturalistic method to sample public interest in large populations and inform health policy planners.