The COVID-19 Pandemic and Mental Health Concerns on Twitter in the United States

Background: Mental health illness is a growing problem in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health concerns (such as fear and loneliness) have been actively discussed on social media. Objective: In this study, we aim to examine mental health discussions on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and infer the demographic composition of Twitter users who had mental health concerns. Methods: COVID-19 related tweets from March 5th, 2020 to January 31st, 2021 were collected through Twitter streaming API using COVID-19 related keywords (e.g., "corona", "covid19", "covid"). By further filtering using mental health keywords (e.g., "depress", "failure", "hopeless"), we extracted mental health-related tweets from the US. Topic modeling using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model was conducted to monitor users' discussions surrounding mental health concerns. Demographic inference using deep learning algorithms (including Face++ and Ethnicolr) was performed to infer the demographic composition of Twitter users who had mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: We observed a positive correlation between mental health concerns on Twitter and the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Topic modeling showed that "stay-at-home", "death poll" and "politics and policy" were the most popular topics in COVID-19 mental health tweets. Among Twitter users who had mental health concerns during the pandemic, Males, White, and 30-49 age group people were more likely to express mental health concerns. In addition, Twitter users from the east and west coast had more mental health concerns. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on mental health concerns on Twitter in the US. Certain groups of people (such as Males, White) were more likely to have mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.