When mental health moves through social media

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - Can a Tweet or a post on Instagram tell us something about our mental health? How meaningful is the relationship between well-being and the use of these platforms? To answer these questions, Marta Fadda, a researcher in bioethics at Università della Svizzera italiana, Oliver Grübner, a health geographer, and Marcus Wolf, a psychologist, at the University of Zurich conducted a series of studies to demonstrate the usefulness of social platforms for mental health research. The team of three researchers won the first UZH Postdoc Team Award. This interdisciplinary research investigates the links between social media posts and the population's mental health. Dr Marta Fadda tells us about it. What does the research consist of? What tools does it use? The research analyses many tweets for which the user's geographic location was available when sharing, using innovative emotion recognition tools. As you can imagine, the extraction, storage, analysis, and sharing of the data and results of the various studies we conducted have important ethical and legal implications. For example, users do not provide informed consent for the analysis of their tweets for specific research purposes, as is usually the case in other studies, and the preservation of these tweets could expose users to risks concerning their privacy.