Use of Twitter to monitor attitudes toward depression and schizophrenia: An exploratory study

Abstract

Introduction. The paper reports on an exploratory study of the usefulness of Twitter for unobtrusive assessment of stigmatizing attitudes in the community. Materials andMethods. Tweets with the hashtags #depression or #schizophrenia posted on Twitter during a 7-day period were collected. Tweets were categorised based on their content and user information and also on the extent to which they indicated a stigmatising attitude towards depression or schizophrenia (stigmatising, personal experience of stigma, supportive, neutral, or anti-stigma). Tweets that indicated stigmatising attitudes or personal experiences of stigma were further grouped into the following subthemes: social distance, dange..