Exploring Mental Health Communications among Instagram Coaches

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Instagram mental health coaches communicate and engage audiences, revealing that professional identity influences support levels and engagement, with implications for improving mental health outreach on social media.

Contribution

It provides a detailed characterization of mental health coaching communication on Instagram and examines how professional identity affects audience engagement and support strategies.

Findings

Support varies by declared professional identity.

Increasing informational support boosts engagement.

Vocabulary effects on engagement are inconsistent across account types.

Abstract

There has been a significant expansion in the use of online social networks (OSNs) to support people experiencing mental health issues. This paper studies the role of Instagram influencers who specialize in coaching people with mental health issues. Using a dataset of 97k posts, we characterize such users' linguistic and behavioural features. We explore how these observations impact audience engagement (as measured by likes). We show that the support provided by these accounts varies based on their self-declared professional identities. For instance, Instagram accounts that declare themselves as Authors offer less support than accounts that label themselves as Coach. We show that increasing information support in general communication positively affects user engagement. However, the effect of vocabulary on engagement is not consistent across the Instagram account types. Our findings shed light on this understudied topic and guide how mental health practitioners can improve outreach.