The Use of Social Media and Its Effects in Patients with Depression and Anxiety Disorder

Background and Purpose: Growing research on depression and anxiety disorder (DAD) has reported that online social media functions not only as a coping strategy for relieving health and financial distress faced by patients, but also as a facilitator promoting their self-care management. Compared to traditional methods (e.g., visiting a doctor), health information via online social media provides a low search cost and convenient time. Despite growing research on the patients with DAD, there is limited evidence for health-related online social media influencing their self-regulation for health care and promotion. To address this research gap, we investigated the relationships between a diagnosis of DAD and using social media for health care, compared to matched peers without DAD. As a theoretical framework, this study employed the Common-Sense Model (Leventhal, Meyer, & Nerenz, 1980). The Common-Sense Model (CSM) depicts individuals’ self-regulation efforts integrating both cognitive and emotional illness representations, coping strategies used to manage threats from illness, and appraisals of coping resources, abilities, and efficacies.

Methods: The Health Information National Trends Survey fifth, Cycle 1 collected by the National Cancer Institute (2018) were used for this study. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust for baseline differences and reduce confounding effects between DAD and non-DAD groups. For PSM, selected variables were as follows: age, race, gender, region, marital status, employment, education, income, caregiving status, self-rated health, and diagnosis of chronic disease. The final sample sizes in this research were 1,048 (524 DAD and 524 non-DAD). A multiple logistic regression was conducted to examine the group differences in the use of online social media after adjusting covariates.

Results: In all models, younger people were more likely to uses of online social media, compared to older people. This study showed that a diagnosis of DAD commonly predicted vising YouTube (odds ratios [OR] 1.41, p < 0.01), using SNSs (OR 1.40, p < 0.05), and participating in OSGs (OR 1.60, p < 0.05) for health care. These results mean that people with mental health problems more seek health information via YouTube, share health issues and concerns through SNSs, and participate in any OSG for discussing health issues they faced. These results highlight that people with mental health problems more seek health information via YouTube, share health issues and concerns through SNSs, and participate in any OSG for discussing health issues they faced.

Conclusions and Implications: Based on the Common-Sense Model, this study examined the relationships between a diagnosis of DAD and online social media. This study revealed that people with DAD significantly utilized online social media for their health purposes than people without DAD. The findings support that people with DAD might visit online social media (e.g., YouTube) more often to learn about symptoms and treatment options, as well as to share their interests and express concerns about health threats on their SNSs. Further research is needed to consider various illness-related information, such as timeline, controllability or cure, and cause, which has been related to patients’ coping efforts and appraisals.