ArticleScientific reports2022
An evaluation of Internet searches as a marker of trends in population mental health in the US.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Potential Harms of Feedback After Web-Based Depression Screening: Secondary Analysis of Negative Effects in the Randomized Controlled DISCOVER Trial.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Trial
- Monitoring Public Health During the 2023 Maui Wildfire Using Google Search Trends.Hawai'i journal of health & social welfare · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between E-Health Literacy, Health Anxiety, Cyberchondria, and Death Anxiety in University Students That Study in Health Related Department.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2025Article
- Digital epidemiology of high-frequency search listening trends for the surveillance of subjective well-being during COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Estimating national and state-level suicide deaths using a novel online symptom search data source.Journal of affective disorders · 2023Article
- Infodemiological analysis of suicide intentions in the US before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.Psychiatry research · 2023Article
- Psychological Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown and Its Evolution: A Case Study Based on Internet Searching Data during the Lockdown of Wuhan 2020 and Shanghai 2022.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Developing, Deploying, and Evaluating Digital Mental Health Interventions in Spaces of Online Help- and Information-Seeking.Procedia computer science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The absence of continuous, real-time mental health assessment has made it challenging to quantify the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on population mental health. We examined publicly available, anonymized, aggregated data on weekly trends in Google searches related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation from 2018 to 2020 in the US. We correlated these trends with (1) emergency department (ED) visits for mental health problems and suicide attempts, and (2) surveys of self-reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, and mental health care use. Search queries related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation decreased sharply around March 2020, returning to pre-pandemic levels by summer 2020. Searches related to depression were correlated with the proportion of individuals reporting receiving therapy (r = 0.73), taking medication (r = 0.62) and having unmet mental healthcare needs (r = 0.57) on US Census Household Pulse Survey and modestly correlated with rates of ED visits for mental health conditions. Results were similar when considering instead searches for anxiety. Searches for suicidal ideation did not correlate with external variables. These results suggest aggregated data on Internet searches can provide timely and continuous insights into population mental health and complement other existing tools in this domain.
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