The Impact of Social Media on COVID-19 in Wuhan, China

Source: Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

This post was written by Gabbie Froiland.

Now that the world is several weeks into this COVID-19 reality, people are starting to feel a new normal. Everyone is spending copious amounts of time indoors, which means one thing—more screen time. The number of hours spent browsing Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are skyrocketing. This is causing many issues, but the most worrisome is the effect on mental health. In the article, “Mental health problems and social media exposure during COVID-19 outbreak” from the PLOS ONE journal, Goa et al. point out:

“The National Health Commission has released guidelines for local authorities to promote psychological crisis intervention for patients, medical personnel, people under medical observation and civilians during the COVID-19 outbreak. However, what type of mental disorders are prevalent and how they distribute among population are not know. So, a rapid assessment of outbreak-associated mental disorders for both civilians and health care workers is needed.”

In order to seek out answers, Goa et al. conducted a study administering surveys through an online platform called Wenjuanxing. The study took place from January 31 to February 2, 2020, and included 4,872 participants, ranging from ages 18-85. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the link between social media use and common mental health disorders during COVID-19.

In the survey, the researchers assessed depression with the Chinese version of the WHO-Five-Well-Being (WHO-5) Index, which looks at overall well-being through a series of questions that can be scored to determine the presence of depression. Similarly, anxiety was assessed with the Chinese version of the generalized anxiety disorder scale (GAD-7), which consists of seven symptoms that individuals may be experiencing. Social media exposure (SME) was assessed by asking individuals how frequently they saw COVID-related information on social media within the last week. The methods that researchers used to quantify this data is as follows:

“Response options were ‘never,’ ‘once in a while,’ ‘sometimes,’ ‘often,’ and ‘very often.’ Because of less proportion of ‘never,’ so we recoded social media exposure into ‘less’ (‘never’ and ‘once in a while’), ‘sometimes,’ and ‘frequently’ (‘often’ and ‘very often’).”

When analyzing the results, researchers found that 8.8 percent of the participants answered “less,” 9.2 percent answered “sometimes,” and 82.0 percent answered “frequently.” The proportion of frequent SME was lower for the men in the study and much higher for people 30 years or younger. One super interesting statistic found in the study was:

“Participants with low education (middle school and high school) had lower proportion of frequently SME than who with high education (college and master). Participants who are students or retired had higher proportion of frequently SME.”

The prevalence of depression among participants was 48.3 percent, with a greater proportion being 21-40-year-old individuals, and was less prevalent in those with a college education. Similarly, the occurrence of anxiety was 22.6 percent, with a greater proportion being 31-40-year-old people, also lower in those with a college education. The combination of anxiety and depression (CDA) was 19.4 percent. In comparison to the latest nation sample of any disorder (except dementia), the prevalence of anxiety and depression was 16.6 percent.

This shows that based on this sample size, and with the current state of China because of COVID-19, the prevalence of mental health disorders has risen dramatically. Goa et al. posit that social media might be the driving force behind this rise in mental health disorders. The authors include,

“Social media is one of [the] main channels updating the COVID-19 information. This study also found that 82.0 percent of participants frequently expose them to social media, and frequent SME [is] associated high odds of anxiety and CDA, which is consistent with previous studies. There may be two reasons explaining the association between frequent SME and mental health. During COVID-19 outbreak, disinformation and false reports about the COVID-19 have bombarded social media and stoked unfounded fears among many netizens, which may confuse people and harm people’s mental health.”

All in all, it is obvious that there is a high prevalence of mental health disorders across China and the entire world, for that matter. It is also apparent that a traumatic circumstance like COVID-19 puts a tremendous amount of stress on a community, and when social media propaganda gets thrown in, it only increases the risk of mental health issues. For China, they find themselves in an advantageous situation, because their government is implementing ways to mitigate the effects of mental health disorders due to COVID-19.

Although this study includes a relatively small sample size, it is time for the rest of the world to consider two options. The first one is: How do we start related conversations of mental health in regard to traumatic events? The second one is: What mental health resources do we already have in place that we can utilize during a season of crisis?

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Gabbie Froiland is an accelerated M.A. student at the Humanitarian and Disaster Institute at Wheaton College. She will obtain her B.S. in Applied Health Science in May of 2020 and is on track to receive her M.A. in Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership in May of 2021.