ArXiv Preprint
The Papageno effect concerns how media can play a positive role in preventing
and mitigating suicidal ideation and behaviors. With the increasing ubiquity
and widespread use of social media, individuals often express and share lived
experiences and struggles with mental health. However, there is a gap in our
understanding about the existence and effectiveness of the Papageno effect in
social media, which we study in this paper. In particular, we adopt a
causal-inference framework to examine the impact of exposure to mental health
coping stories on individuals on Twitter. We obtain a Twitter dataset with
$\sim$2M posts by $\sim$10K individuals. We consider engaging with coping
stories as the Treatment intervention, and adopt a stratified propensity score
approach to find matched cohorts of Treatment and Control individuals. We
measure the psychosocial shifts in affective, behavioral, and cognitive
outcomes in longitudinal Twitter data before and after engaging with the coping
stories. Our findings reveal that, engaging with coping stories leads to
decreased stress and depression, and improved expressive writing, diversity,
and interactivity. Our work discusses the practical and platform design
implications in supporting mental wellbeing.
Yunhao Yuan, Koustuv Saha, Barbara Keller, Erkki Tapio Isometsä, Talayeh Aledavood
2023-02-20
