JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

According to recent studies, the COVID-19 pandemic can be recognized as a traumatic event that may lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the general population. Social support can play an important role in the treatment of PTSD, particularly during periods of the pandemic. Many people used social media to communicate with and support each other during the pandemic due to physical distancing requirements. Therefore, it is important to explore how people with PTSD support each other on social media.

Objective:

This exploratory study aimed to gain insight on how people communicated on Twitter to seek and provide social support for PTSD during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods:

This study first applied content analysis to assess the type of social support people with PTSD sought during the pandemic. Sentiment analysis was also performed to track the negative and positive tweets between January 2020 and March 2021. Additionally, associations between terms representing topics of interest related to PTSD and their corresponding sentiments were discovered using the association rule mining approach. Lastly, Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to examine whether the number of retweets and favorites differed based on social support types.

Results:

The findings show that people with PTSD are mostly seeking emotional support during the pandemic. People with PTSD mostly posted negative tweets, especially in January 2021. Interestingly, wearing masks led to several health problems among people with PTSD, as wearing face coverings may trigger and worsen PTSD symptoms, such as severe anxiety. The results revealed that people generally seek and provide emotional support on Twitter about the challenging aspects of wearing masks, mental health status, financial difficulties, and treatment methods of PTSD. Also, tweets on emotional support were most endorsed by other users.

Conclusions:

This study demonstrates the potential of social media as a platform to exchange social support during difficult times and to identify specific problems (e.g., wearing masks and exacerbated symptoms) for individuals with mental health conditions, such as persons living with PTSD. These findings may help to inform policymakers and health organizations of better practices for the pandemic response and special considerations for groups with history of trauma.