Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Sep 14, 2021
Date Accepted: May 27, 2022
Characterizing Social Media and Digital Data Use in Mental Health Therapy from Patient and Therapist Perspectives
ABSTRACT
Background:
Incorporating insights from social media into the patient provider encounter is increasingly being explored in healthcare settings. Less is known about the utility of this data in mental health therapy.
Objective:
This study aimed to prospectively investigate and characterize how social media and digital data is used in mental health therapy from both the patient and mental health therapist perspective.
Methods:
Patients enrolled in mental health therapy and mental health therapists were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. All interviews were transcribed and coded using a deductive framework analysis. Themes and sub-themes were identified. Participants completed a socio-demographic survey while mental health therapists also completed a behavioral norms and elicitation survey.
Results:
Seventeen participants: mental health therapists (48%, 8) and patients (52%, 9), were interviewed. Overall, participants identified four themes and nine sub-themes. Themes were current data collection practices, social media and digital data in therapy, advantages of social media and digital data in therapy, and disadvantages of social media and digital data in therapy. Most sub-themes were related to advantages of and disadvantages of incorporating digital data in mental health therapy. Advantage sub-themes included convenience objective, builds rapport, and user-friendly while disadvantage sub-themes were digital data/social media is non-reflective, ethically ambiguous, and non-generalizable. Injunctive and descriptive normative beliefs mapped onto two advantage sub-themes: convenience and objectivity.
Conclusions:
This qualitative pilot study established advantages and disadvantages of social media and digital data use in mental health therapy. Patients and therapists highlighted similar concerns and uses. This study indicated that overall, both patients and therapists are interested in and comfortable to use and discuss social media and digital data in mental health therapy.
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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.