文章基本信息

标题：Seasonality Patterns of Internet Searches on Mental Health: Exploratory Infodemiology Study
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作者：Noam Soreni ; Duncan H Cameron ; David L Streiner 等
期刊名称：JMIR Mental Health
电子版ISSN：2368-7959
出版年度：2019
卷号：6
期号：4
页码：1-20
DOI：10.2196/12974
出版社：JMIR Publications Inc., Toronto, Canada
摘要：Background The study of seasonal patterns of public interest in psychiatric disorders has important theoretical and practical implications for service planning and delivery. The recent explosion of internet searches suggests that mining search databases yields unique information on public interest in mental health disorders, which is a significantly more affordable approach than population health studies. Objective This study aimed to investigate seasonal patterns of internet mental health queries in Ontario, Canada. Methods Weekly data on health queries in Ontario from Google Trends were downloaded for a 5-year period (2012-2017) for the terms “schizophrenia,” “autism,” “bipolar,” “depression,” “anxiety,” “OCD” (obsessive-compulsive disorder), and “suicide.” Control terms were overall search results for the terms “health” and “how.” Time-series analyses using a continuous wavelet transform were performed to isolate seasonal components in the search volume for each term. Results All mental health queries showed significant seasonal patterns with peak periodicity occurring over the winter months and troughs occurring during summer, except for “suicide.” The comparison term “health” also exhibited seasonal periodicity, while the term “how” did not, indicating that general information seeking may not follow a seasonal trend in the way that mental health information seeking does. Conclusions Seasonal patterns of internet search volume in a wide range of mental health terms were observed, with the exception of “suicide.” Our study demonstrates that monitoring internet search trends is an affordable, instantaneous, and naturalistic method to sample public interest in large populations and inform health policy planners.
关键词：Google;OCD;anxiety;autism;depression;infodemiology;infoveillance;internet;mental health;schizophrenia;seasonality;suicide