Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Aug 24, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 12, 2020 - Oct 7, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 1, 2021
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Understanding University Students’ Experiences, Perceptions, and Attitudes Toward Peers Displaying Mental Health-related Problems on Social Network Sites
ABSTRACT
Background:
College students are at a vulnerable age; among those with serious mental health problems, this period is frequently when the first episodes appear. As a result, college students are increasingly disclosing their vulnerable, stigmatized experiences on social networking sites (SNSs). Understanding students’ perceptions and attitudes toward their peers who are dealing with mental health problems is vital to the efforts to eliminate peer exclusion and foster social support.
Objective:
This work aims to provide a better understanding of how college perceive and react to their fellow students’ mental health related activities on SNSs. We investigate how students recognize, perceive, and react to peers who display mental health related challenges on SNSs.
Methods:
Survey with 226 students, and semi structured interviews with 20 students were conducted at six universities in South Korea.
Results:
We revealed that a considerable number of college students did not proactively provide support even when they identified at-risk peers because of stigmatized content, unusual online activities, or a gap between online and offline identities. We found that the students’ lack of knowledge, confidence, and expectations as well as their desire to maintain distance from at-risk peers hindered social support.
Conclusions:
On the basis of this study’s finding, we discuss SNS design guideline that would help these platforms facilitate support exchanges among peers while minimizing potential risks.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.