Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Apr 19, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 19, 2020 - May 29, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 12, 2020
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Instagram As a Window to Societal Perspective on Mental Health, Gender, and Race: An Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
A wide variety of health topics are discussed on Instagram, making the social media platform a rich source of information for health care professionals. Social gender constructs have an impact on health, and in particular on mental health. Certain aspects of the masculine ideal are hypothesized to contribute to depression among men, simultaneously creating a barrier to help-seeking behaviors. Women are consistently more likely than men to seek professional help for mental health concerns. We further hypothesized that mental health among women may have greater visibility than mental health among men on Instagram.
Objective:
Our project aimed to make observations about the frequency with which men and women are featured in Instagram posts tagged with #mentalhealth. To control for Instagram usage differences between genders, we also examined the frequency with which men and women are featured in photos tagged with #health. Finally, we assessed the frequency with which white versus non-white subjects are featured in these categories.
Methods:
Instagram’s search function was used to generate two collections of public Instagram photos: those tagged with #health, and those tagged with #mentalhealth. The most recently posted 200 photos in each collection featuring adult human subjects with discernable gender were included for analysis. For each included photo, the number, gender(s), and race(s) of human subjects was assessed manually by the investigator and recorded in a simple tally to count gender and race totals for each set of photos. Photos featuring children (estimated to be under 18 years) were excluded. Photos featuring both children and adults were included, but children were not counted in analyses. Photos of large groups (>12 subjects) were excluded. Repeat photos were excluded. Photos featuring human subjects but from which it was unreasonable to discern gender were excluded. Two-hundred photos for each hashtag were used to have an 80% power to determine a 12% difference with a 0.05 alpha or p value. P-values were calculated using chi-square analysis on GraphPad Prism.
Results:
The first 200 photos tagged with #health featured 150 (53%) women and 132 (47%) men (p=0.2838). The first 200 photos tagged with #mentalhealth featured 197 (70%) women and 84 (30%) men (p<0.0001). Both #health and #mentalhealth photos featured more white subjects (50% and 64%, respectively) than non-white subjects (29% and 28%) or subjects of unknown race (21% and 8%).
Conclusions:
Women are featured more frequently than men in Instagram photos tagged with #mentalhealth. The topic of #health, meanwhile, is not gendered this way. Low visibility of mental health among men and minorities may be a sign of, or perhaps exacerbate, the existing stigma and barriers to care for these populations. Knowledge of Instagram use by the public may guide future outreach by mental health professionals.
Citation
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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.