#selfharn on Instagram: understanding online communities surrounding non-suicidal self-injury through conversations and common properties among authors (original) (raw)
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Analysis of nonsuicidal self-injury posts on Twitter: A quantitative and qualitative research
Research, Society and Development, 2021
Retrospective study, of mixed approach, with quantitative and qualitative approaches, with the objective of analyzing posts about non-suicidal self-harm on Twitter. The posts were collected through screen capture, transcribed and encoded. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, association tests and multiple logistic regression, with a significance level of 5%. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke. In the results, female profile tweets and potentially harmful content prevailed. The expression of the suicidal behavior of the author of the post was associated with the encouragement of non-suicidal self-harm and increased chances of sharing and commenting on the posts. Reply posts were more likely to receive likes and comments. Posts encouraging non-suicidal self-harm describe social manifestations of behavior and exposure to non-suicidal self-harm through mass communication. The results bring important discussions about the p...
Self-harm and social media: thematic analysis of images posted on three social media sites
BMJ Open, 2019
ObjectivesTo explore the nature of images tagged as self-harm on popular social media sites and what this might tell us about how these sites are used.DesignA visual content and thematic analysis of a sample of 602 images captured from Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.ResultsOver half the images tagged as self-harm had no explicit representation of self-harm. Where there was explicit representation, self-injury was the most common; none of these portrayed images of graphic or shocking self-injury. None of the images we captured specifically encouraged self-harm or suicide and there was no image that could be construed as sensationalising self-harm.Four themes were found across the images: communicating distress, addiction and recovery, gender and the female body, identity and belonging.ConclusionsFindings suggest that clinicians should not be overly anxious about what is being posted on social media. Although we found a very few posts suggesting self-injury was attractive, there were n...
An Analysis of Depression, Self-Harm, and Suicidal Ideation Content on Tumblr
Crisis, 2016
Social networking about depression can be indicative of self-reported depression and/or can normalize risk behaviors such as self-harm and suicidal ideation. To gain a better understanding of the depression, self-harm, and suicidal content that is being shared on Tumblr. From April 16 to May 10, 2014, 17 popular depression-related Tumblr accounts were monitored for new posts and engagement with other Tumblr users. A total of 3,360 posts were randomly selected from all historical posts from these accounts and coded based on themes ascertained by the research team. The 17 Tumblr accounts posted a median number of 185 posts (range = 0-2,954). Content was engaged with (i.e., re-blogged or liked) a median number of 1,677,362 times (range = 0-122,186,504). Of the 3,360 randomly selected posts, 2,739 (82%) were related to depression, suicide, or self-harm. Common themes were self-loathing (412, 15%), loneliness/feeling unloved (405, 15%), self-harm (407, 15%), and suicide (372, 14%). This ...
Self-harm: detection and support on Twitter
2021
Since the advent of online social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, useful health-related studies have been conducted using the information posted by online participants. Personal health-related issues such as mental health, self-harm and depression have been studied because users often share their stories on such platforms. Online users resort to sharing because the empathy and support from online communities are crucial in helping the affected individuals. A preliminary analysis shows how contents related to non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) proliferate on Twitter. Thus, we use Twitter to collect relevant data, analyse, and proffer ways of supporting users prone to NSSI behaviour. Our approach utilises a custom crawler to retrieve relevant tweets from self-reporting users and relevant organisations interested in combating self-harm. Through textual analysis, we identify six major categories of self-harming users consisting of inflicted, anti-self-harm, support seekers, r...
Responses to a Self-Presented Suicide Attempt in Social Media
Crisis, 2013
Background: The self-presentation of suicidal acts in social media has become a public health concern. Aims: This article centers on a Chinese microblogger who posted a wrist-cutting picture that was widely circulated in Chinese social media in 2011. This exploratory study examines written reactions of a group of Chinese microbloggers exposed to the post containing a self-harming message and photo. In addition, we investigate the pattern of information diffusion via a social network. Methods: We systematically collected and analyzed 5,971 generated microblogs and the network of information diffusion. Results: We found that a significant portion of written responses (36.6%) could help vulnerable netizens by providing peer-support and calls for help. These responses were reposted and diffused via an online social network with markedly more clusters of users – and at a faster pace – than a set of randomly generated networks. Conclusions: We conclude that social media can be a double-ed...
“I just might kill myself”: Suicide expressions on Twitter
Death Studies, 2018
In order to examine how Twitter can be a significant indicator of how suicidal thoughts occur and spread, we used content analysis to analyze 4524 Twitter messages. Although expressions of "wanting to die" occurred frequently, most of the tweets appeared to be non-threatening. In addition, discussions about suicide on Twitter mostly involved sharing suicide prevention resources with fellow users. This finding suggests that Twitter could offer an efficient way to circulate suicide awareness materials across geographical bounds.
Social media, self-harm and suicide
BJPsych Bulletin
Summary Use of social media by people with mental health problems, and especially those who are prone to self-harm, has potential advantages and disadvantages. This poses a dilemma about how and by how much the form and content of social media sites should be regulated. Unfortunately, participation in the public debate about this dilemma has been restricted and high-profile discussion of necessary action has been focused almost entirely on how much suppression of content is justified. Professional bodies, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, should be doing much more than they are to shape how the debate is conducted.
Identifying Depression and Suicide Displays on Twitter: Key Search Terms and Characteristics
Depression is a pervasive health issue, which often goes untreated. The social media website, Facebook, has been examined as a potential innovative tool to identify and engage individuals in treatment. Twitter, another social media website, has yet to be examined. The purpose of this study was to examine if and how depression and suicide references are being displayed on Twitter. Text analytics software, Discover Text, was used to collect public tweets using the search terms "depressed" and "depression" during one week in 2013. Within this sample, suicide-related terms were used to identify suicide-related tweets. A subsample of 1,000 "depression" and 324 suicide-related tweets were randomly selected for content analysis. The tweets were examined by three trained coders for categories of clinical relevance, tweet originality, format, and subject, and were examined using a validated depression symptom code-book. A total of 297,107 "depression" tweets (which icludes tweets identified with both search terms of "depressed" and "depression") and 7,538 suicide-related tweets were collected over seven days. The suicide-related search terms yielding the most clinically relevant references to suicide ideation included: "suicide", "kill myself", and "want to die". The "depression" tweets most commonly were comprised of unoriginal content (60.4%), personal experiences with depression (49.4%), and referenced depression in relation to the self (45.1%). The "suicide-related" tweets most commonly referenced original content, and similar to the "depression" tweets, most commonly referenced personal experiences and the self. Of the subsample of "depression" tweets that included original content and referenced the self, 60.4% referenced one or more symptoms of depression. In conclusion, references to depression and suicidality occur on Twitter. They are expressed in a personal manner, and can include depression symptoms. Healthcare providers should be aware that Twitter is a potential outlet for discussing depression and suicide disclosures. Future research should examine acceptability and feasibility of contacting these potentially at-risk individuals.
International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics
While many studies have explored the use of social media and behavioral changes of individuals, few examined the utility of using social media for suicide detection and prevention. The study by Jashinsky et al. identified specific language patterns associated with a set of twelve suicide risk factors. The authors extended these methods to assess the significance of the language used on Twitter for suicide detection. This article quantifies the use of Twitter to express suicide related language, and its potential to detect users at high risk of suicide. The authors searched Twitter for tweets indicative of 12 suicide risk factors. This paper divided Twitter users into two groups: “high risk” and “at risk” based on two of the risk factors (“self-harm” and “prior suicide attempts”) and examined language patterns by computing co-occurrences of terms in tweets which helped identify relationships between suicide risk factors in both groups.