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. 2023 Nov 15:14:1192123.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1192123. eCollection 2023.

Korean adolescents' coping strategies on self-harm, ADHD, insomnia during COVID-19: text mining of social media big data

Ryemi Do #  1 , Soyeon Kim #  2   3 , You Bin Lim  4 , Su-Jin Kim  1 , Hyerim Kwon  1 , Jong-Min Kim  5 , Sooyeon Lee  4 , Bung-Nyun Kim  4
Affiliations

Korean adolescents' coping strategies on self-harm, ADHD, insomnia during COVID-19: text mining of social media big data

Ryemi Do et al. Front Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Introduction: Since the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), public safety measures, including social distancing and school closures, have been implemented, precipitating psychological difficulties and heightened online activities for adolescents. However, studies examining the impact of the pandemic on adolescent mental health and their coping strategies in Asian countries are limited. Further, most studies have used survey measures to capture mental health challenges so far. Accordingly, this study aimed to examine the psychological challenges South Korean adolescents experienced and their coping strategies during the pandemic using the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text mining (TM) technique on adolescents' social media texts/posts.

Methods: The data were gathered from social media texts/posts such as online communities, Twitter, and personal blogs from January 1, 2019, to October 31, 2021. The 12,520,250 texts containing keywords related to adolescents' common psychological difficulties reported during the pandemic, including self-harm, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD), and insomnia, were analyzed by TM, NLP using information extraction, co-occurrence and sentiment analysis. The monthly frequency of the keywords and their associated words was also analyzed to understand the time trend.

Results: Adolescents used the word "self-harm" in their social media texts more frequently during the second wave of COVID-19 (August to September 2020). "Friends" was the most associated word with "self-harm." While the frequency of texts with "Insomnia" stayed constant throughout the pandemic, the word "ADHD" was increasingly mentioned in social media. ADHD and insomnia were most frequently associated with ADHD medications and sleeping pills, respectively. Friends were generally associated with positive words, while parents were associated with negative words.

Conclusion: During COVID-19, Korean adolescents often expressed their psychological challenges on social media platforms. However, their coping strategies seemed less efficient to help with their difficulties, warranting strategies to support them in the prolonged pandemic era. For example, Korean adolescents shared psychological challenges such as self-harm with friends rather than their parents. They considered using medicine (e.g., sleeping pills and ADHD medication) as coping strategies for sleep and attention problems.

Keywords: COVID-19; South Korea; adolescent; attention; insomnia; self-harm; social media; text mining.

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Conflict of interest statement

J-MK was employed by VAIV company. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow chart of framework and texts in this study.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Monthly frequency of self-harm-mentioned texts on Twitter.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Monthly frequency of ADHD-mentioned texts on adolescents’ online communities.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Monthly frequency of insomnia-mentioned texts on adolescents’ online communities.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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