JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Twitter is an indicator of “real-world performance”, thus is an appropriate arena to assess the social consideration and attitudes toward psychosis.

Objective:

To perform a mixed-methods study of the content and key metrics of tweets referring to psychosis in comparison to tweets referring to control diseases (Breast Cancer, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s and HIV).

Methods:

Each tweet’s content was rated as nonmedical (NM: testimonies, health care products, solidarity/awareness and misuse) or medical (M: included a reference to the illness’s diagnosis, treatment, prognosis or prevention). NM tweets were classified as positive or pejorative. We assessed the appropriateness of the medical content. The number of retweets generated and the potential reach and impact of the hashtags analyzed was also investigated.

Results:

We analyzed a total of 15,443 tweets: 8,055 classified as NM and 7,287 as M. Psychosis-related tweets (PRT) had a significantly higher frequency of misuse (33.38% vs 1.15%, p<0.001) and pejorative content (36.22% vs 11.33%, p<0.001). The medical content of the PRT showed the highest scientific appropriateness (100% vs 93.66%, p<0,001) and had a higher frequency of content about disease prevention. The potential reach and impact of the tweets related to psychosis were low, but they had a high retweet-to-tweet ratio.

Conclusions:

We show a reduced number and a different pattern of contents in tweets about psychosis compared to control diseases. Psychosis-related tweets showed a predominance of non-medical content with increased frequencies of misuse and pejorative tone. However, the medical content of psychosis-related tweets showed high scientific appropriateness aimed toward prevention.