JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With increasing frequency and magnitude of disasters internationally, there is growing research and clinical interest in the application of social media sites for disaster mental health surveillance. However, important questions remain regarding the extent to which unstructured social media data can be harnessed for clinically meaningful decision-making.

Objective:

This comprehensive scoping review synthesises the interdisciplinary literature, with particular focus on research methods and applications.

Methods:

Six health and computer science databases were searched for studies published prior to April 20th, 2021, identifying 47 studies. Included studies were published in peer-reviewed outlets and examined mental health during disasters or crises using social media data.

Results:

Applications across 31 mental health issues were identified, which were grouped into three broader themes: (i) estimating mental health burden; (ii) planning or evaluating interventions/policies, and (iii) knowledge discovery. Mental health assessments were completed primarily using lexical dictionaries and human annotation. Analysis included a range of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, statistical modelling, and qualitative techniques. The overall reporting quality was poor, with key details such as the total number of users and data features often not reported. Further, biases in sample selection and related limitations in generalisability were often overlooked.

Conclusions:

The application of social media monitoring has considerable potential for measuring the mental health impact on populations during disasters. Studies have primarily conceptualised mental health in broad terms, such as distress or negative affect, with greater focus required on validating mental health assessments. There was little evidence for clinical integration of social media-based disaster mental health monitoring, such as combining surveillance with social media-based intervention or developing and testing real-world disaster management tools. To address issues with study quality, a structured set of reporting guidelines are recommended to improve the methodological quality, replicability and clinical relevance of future research on social media monitoring of mental health during disasters.