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. 2020 Sep 21;22(9):e22181.
doi: 10.2196/22181.

Increased Internet Searches for Insomnia as an Indicator of Global Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multinational Longitudinal Study

Yu-Hsuan Lin  1   2   3   4 , Ting-Wei Chiang  1 , Yu-Lun Lin  2
Affiliations

Increased Internet Searches for Insomnia as an Indicator of Global Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multinational Longitudinal Study

Yu-Hsuan Lin et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

Background: Real-time global mental health surveillance is urgently needed for tracking the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: This study aimed to use Google Trends data to investigate the impact of the pandemic on global mental health by analyzing three keywords indicative of mental distress: "insomnia," "depression," and "suicide."

Methods: We examined increases in search queries for 19 countries. Significant increases were defined as the actual daily search value (from March 20 to April 19, 2020) being higher than the 95% CIs of the forecast from the 3-month baseline via ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) modeling. We examined the correlation between increases in COVID-19-related deaths and the number of days with significant increases in search volumes for insomnia, depression, and suicide across multiple nations.

Results: The countries with the greatest increases in searches for insomnia were Iran, Spain, the United States, and Italy; these countries exhibited a significant increase in insomnia searches on more than 10 of the 31 days observed. The number of COVID-19-related deaths was positively correlated to the number of days with an increase in searches for insomnia in the 19 countries (ρ=0.64, P=.003). By contrast, there was no significant correlation between the number of deaths and increases in searches for depression (ρ=-0.12, P=.63) or suicide (ρ=-0.07, P=.79).

Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that insomnia could be a part of routine mental health screening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; Google Trends; infodemiology; infoveillance; insomnia; internet search; mental health.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Daily trends for all Google searches for the term “insomnia” alongside expected trends for the days after March 20, 2020, in (A) Spain and (B) Germany.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Daily trends for all Google searches with the term “suicide,” alongside expected trends for the days after March 20, 2020, in (A) Spain and (B) Germany.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Positive correlation between increases in COVID-19–related deaths and the number of days with an increase in searches for insomnia in 19 countries (Spearman correlation coefficient=0.64, P=.003) from March 20 to April 19, 2020.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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