1. 'I Haven’t Been Diagnosed, but I Should Be'—Insight Into Self-diagnoses of Common Mental Health Disorders: Cross-sectional Study
- Author
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Lauren A Rutter, Jacqueline Howard, Prabhvir Lakhan, Danny Valdez, Johan Bollen, and Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces
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Medicine - Abstract
BackgroundIn recent years, social media has become a rich source of mental health data. However, there is a lack of web-based research on the accuracy and validity of self-reported diagnostic information available on the web. ObjectiveAn analysis of the degree of correspondence between self-reported diagnoses and clinical indicators will afford researchers and clinicians higher levels of trust in social media analyses. We hypothesized that self-reported diagnoses would correspond to validated disorder-specific severity questionnaires across 2 large web-based samples. MethodsThe participants of study 1 were 1123 adults from a national Qualtrics panel (mean age 34.65, SD 12.56 years; n=635, 56.65% female participants,). The participants of study 2 were 2237 college students from a large university in the Midwest (mean age 19.08, SD 2.75 years; n=1761, 75.35% female participants). All participants completed a web-based survey on their mental health, social media use, and demographic information. Additionally, the participants reported whether they had ever been diagnosed with a series of disorders, with the option of selecting “Yes”; “No, but I should be”; “I don’t know”; or “No” for each condition. We conducted a series of ANOVA tests to determine whether there were differences among the 4 diagnostic groups and used post hoc Tukey tests to examine the nature of the differences. ResultsIn study 1, for self-reported mania (F3,1097=2.75; P=.04), somatic symptom disorder (F3,1060=26.75; P
- Published
- 2023
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