Open Access

ARTICLE

Analyzing COVID-2019 Impact on Mental Health Through Social Media Forum

Huma¹, Muhammad Khalid Sohail², Nadeem Akhtar³, Dost Muhammad³, Humaira Afzal⁴, Muhammad Rafiq Mufti⁵, Shahid Hussain^6,*, Mansoor Ahmed¹
1 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University, Islamabad, 45550, Pakistan
2 Department of Management Sciences, Bahria Business School, Bahria University, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan
3 Department of Computer Science & IT, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur. 63100, Pakistan
4 Department of Computer Science, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, 60800, Pakistan
5 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Vehari Campus, 61100, Pakistan
6 Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97401, Oregon, USA
* Corresponding Author: Shahid Hussain. Email:
(This article belongs to this Special Issue: COVID-19 impacts on Software Engineering industry and research community)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 67(3), 3737-3748. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.014398

Received 18 September 2020; Accepted 05 December 2020; Issue published 01 March 2021

Abstract

This study aims to identify the potential association of mental health and social media forum during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 brings a lot of challenges to government globally. Among the different strategies the most extensively adopted ones were lockdown, social distancing, and isolation among others. Most people with no mental illness history have been found with high risk of distress and psychological discomfort due to anxiety of being infected with the virus. Panic among people due to COVID-19 spread faster than the disease itself. The misinformation and excessive usage of social media in this pandemic era have adversely affected mental health across the world. Due to limited historical data, psychiatrists are finding it difficult to cure the mental illness of people resulting from the pandemic repercussion, fueled by social media forum. In this study the methodology used for data extraction is by considering the implications of social network platforms (such as Reddit) and levering the capabilities of a semi-supervised co-training technique-based use of Naïve Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. The experimental results shows the efficacy of the proposed methodology to identify the mental illness level (such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, and OCD) of those who are in anxious of being infected with this virus. We observed 1 to 5% improvement in the classification decision through the proposed method as compared to state-of-the-art classifiers.

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Keywords

SARS-CoV-2; mental health; social media; Reddit; machine learning

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Citations