Examining the relationship between COVID-19 and suicide in media coverage through Natural Language Processing analysis

IF 2.5 4区医学 Q2 PSYCHIATRY

European Journal of Psychiatry Pub Date : 2023-10-09 DOI:10.1016/j.ejpsy.2023.100227

Hugo J. Bello , Nora Palomar-Ciria , Celia Lozano , Carlos Gutiérrez-Alonso , Enrique Baca-García

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Background and objectives

Suicide is a major public health concern, media can influence its awareness, contagion, and prevention. In this study, we evaluated the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and suicide in media coverage through Natural Language Processing analysis (NPL).

Methods

To study how suicide is depicted in news media, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data techniques were used to analyze news and tweets, to extract or classify the topic to which they belonged.

Results

A granger causality analysis showed with significant p-value that an increase in covid news at the beginning of the pandemic explains a later rise in suicide-related news. An analysis based on correlation and structural causal models show a strong relationship between the appearance of subjects “health” and “covid”, and also between “covid” and “suicide”.

Conclusions

Our analysis also uncovers that the inclusion of suicide-related news in the category health has grown since the outbreak of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an inflection point in the way suicide-related news are reported. Our study found that the increased media attention on suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic may indicate rising social awareness of suicide and mental health, which could lead to the development of new prevention tools.

查看原文本刊更多论文

通过自然语言处理分析研究媒体报道中新冠肺炎与自杀之间的关系

背景和目的自杀是一个主要的公共卫生问题，媒体可以影响其意识、传染和预防。在这项研究中，我们通过自然语言处理分析（NPL）评估了新冠肺炎大流行与媒体报道中自杀之间的关系。方法为了研究自杀在新闻媒体中的描述，运用人工智能和大数据技术对新闻和推文进行分析，提取或分类其所属话题。结果granger因果关系分析以显著p值显示，在大流行开始时新冠肺炎新闻的增加解释了随后自杀相关新闻的增加。基于相关性和结构因果模型的分析显示，受试者的外表“健康”与“新冠肺炎”之间以及“新冠肺炎”与“自杀”之间存在着强烈的关系。结论我们的分析还发现，自疫情爆发以来，将自杀相关新闻纳入健康类别的人数有所增加。新冠肺炎大流行为自杀相关新闻的报道方式带来了转折点。我们的研究发现，在新冠肺炎大流行期间，媒体对自杀的关注增加，这可能表明社会对自杀和心理健康的认识不断提高，这可能会导致新的预防工具的开发。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

European Journal of Psychiatry PSYCHIATRY-

CiteScore

2.90

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

43 days

期刊介绍： The European journal of psychiatry is a quarterly publication founded in 1986 and directed by Professor Seva until his death in 2004. It was originally intended to report “the scientific activity of European psychiatrists” and “to bring about a greater degree of communication” among them. However, “since scientific knowledge has no geographical or cultural boundaries, is open to contributions from all over the world”. These principles are maintained in the new stage of the journal, now expanded with the help of an American editor.