# Exploring mental health literacy among information technology (IT) professionals: Twitter content analysis

## TL;DR

This study uses Twitter content to explore how information technology professionals understand and discuss mental health, finding gaps in recognizing specific disorders.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel method for assessing mental health literacy in a natural setting using social media content analysis.

## Key findings

- Most tweets focused on risk factors, self-treatment, and help-seeking for mental health.
- Tweets about recognizing specific disorders were significantly less common.
- Collaborating with trusted IT organizations could improve mental health literacy among professionals.

## Abstract

Mental health literacy has largely been studied via vignettes and surveys. Capturing the reality of the mental health literacy dimensions in a natural setting is an important step for moving towards a more actionable phase for mental health literacy. This study aims to identify the frequency patterns of the four mental health literacy dimensions reflected in the mental health-related tweets specific to information technology professionals. 15,782 tweets from October 2018 to October 2022 were collected from information technology-specific accounts. Content analysis, specifically a multi-class text classification approach, was used to analyze and interpret the tweets and categorize them into themes based on the mental health literacy construct. Tweets on “Knowledge and beliefs about risk factors and causes, self-treatments/interventions, and professional help available” were the most common (n = 6,179), and tweets on “ability to recognize specific disorders” (n = 196) were the least common. The ease of sharing content on X (formerly Twitter) could be leveraged to increase mental health awareness via targeted educational material on how to recognize specific disorders, seek help, and therefore improve mental health. Integrating mental health literacy information with the content being shared by well-established organizations in the information technology sector could help to enhance mental health literacy among information technology professionals.

Mental health literacy was first coined in 1997 by Anthony Jorm. The term includes four key areas that are a holistic understanding of mental health. We know, based on survey data, that levels of understanding about mental health vary among groups. However, we do not yet have a method for assessing mental health literacy in the natural world. Here, we took an interdisciplinary approach and used content analysis to test whether we could map tweets to the four dimensions of mental health literacy. We found most tweets were about understanding mental health risk factors and causes, self-treatment, and where to seek help. However, attitudes that promote recognition and appropriate help-seeking were represented by far fewer tweets. By working with well-known, trusted organizations, we can share helpful information to improve mental health knowledge among professionals. Our study provides new insights on which areas of mental health literacy (the ability to recognize specific disorders) need more direct focus when attempting to improve mental health literacy.