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The magnitude of COVID-19 related stress, anxiety and depression associated with intense mass media coverage in Saudi Arabia.

ABSTRACT: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in catastrophic consequences in many aspects of life; including negative psychological effects. We aimed to assess the mental health status of a group of Saudi population during this pandemic. Also, we aimed to assess the effect of the intensive media coverage of the pandemic news on mental health status. A questionnaire was distributed online to test depression, anxiety, and stress (using the DASS-21 scale) and their relationship to certain variables. A total of 215 respondents were included. Higher mental health prevalence rates were reported in non-Saudi participants compared to Saudi ones (i.e., 50.74% vs. 30.40%; 34.23% vs. 13.51% and 59.70% vs. 27.70%; for depression, anxiety and stress, respectively). About 55.8% of the participants felt the extensive coverage in the media of COVID-19 news, which caused higher mental sufferings. Higher mental health prevalence rates were reported in females compared to males participants (i.e., 56.97% vs. 23.25%; 30.23% vs. 13.17% and 54.65% vs. 26.35%; for depression, anxiety and stress, respectively). Reasonable following of the COVID-19 news; and less exposure to the pandemic information could help in reducing the mental health issues related to the ongoing pandemic. Special care and attention should be paid to females and younger people who seem to be particularly affected during the era of COVID-19.

SUBMITTER: Zakout YM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7505795 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The magnitude of COVID-19 related stress, anxiety and depression associated with intense mass media coverage in Saudi Arabia.

Zakout Yosef Mohamed-Azzam YM Alreshidi Fayez Saud FS Elsaid Ruba Mustafa RM Ahmed Hussain Gadelkarim HG

AIMS public health 20200901 3

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in catastrophic consequences in many aspects of life; including negative psychological effects. We aimed to assess the mental health status of a group of Saudi population during this pandemic. Also, we aimed to assess the effect of the intensive media coverage of the pandemic news on mental health status. A questionnaire was distributed online to test depression, anxiety, and stress (using the DASS-21 scale) and their relationship to certain v ...[more]

PMID: 32968685

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Social media platforms play a vital role in the dissemination of health information. However, evidence suggests that a high proportion of Twitter posts (ie, tweets) are not necessarily accurate, and many studies suggest that tweets do not need to be accurate, or at least evidence based, to receive traction. This is a dangerous combination in the sphere of health information. OBJECTIVE:The first objective of this study is to examine health-related tweets originating from Saudi Arabia in terms of their accuracy. The second objective is to find factors that relate to the accuracy and dissemination of these tweets, thereby enabling the identification of ways to enhance the dissemination of accurate tweets. The initial findings from this study and methodological improvements will then be employed in a larger-scale study that will address these issues in more detail. METHODS:A health lexicon was used to extract health-related tweets using the Twitter application programming interface and the results were further filtered manually. A total of 300 tweets were each labeled by two medical doctors; the doctors agreed that 109 tweets were either accurate or inaccurate. Other measures were taken from these tweets' metadata to see if there was any relationship between the measures and either the accuracy or the dissemination of the tweets. The entire range of this metadata was analyzed using Python, version 3.6.5 (Python Software Foundation), to answer the research questions posed. RESULTS:A total of 34 out of 109 tweets (31.2%) in the dataset used in this study were classified as untrustworthy health information. These came mainly from users with a non-health care background and social media accounts that had no corresponding physical (ie, organization) manifestation. Unsurprisingly, we found that traditionally trusted health sources were more likely to tweet accurate health information than other users. Likewise, these provisional results suggest that tweets posted in the morning are more trustworthy than tweets posted at night, possibly corresponding to official and casual posts, respectively. Our results also suggest that the crowd was quite good at identifying trustworthy information sources, as evidenced by the number of times a tweet's author was tagged as favorited by the community. CONCLUSIONS:The results indicate some initially surprising factors that might correlate with the accuracy of tweets and their dissemination. For example, the time a tweet was posted correlated with its accuracy, which may reflect a difference between professional (ie, morning) and hobbyist (ie, evening) tweets. More surprisingly, tweets containing a kashida-a decorative element in Arabic writing used to justify the text within lines-were more likely to be disseminated through retweets. These findings will be further assessed using data analysis techniques on a much larger dataset in future work.

Project description:Over the past two decades, the rapid rise of social media has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information online. Social media platforms are not now only used extensively by individuals but also by businesses, governmental agencies, educational institutions, and many other organizations to deliver information to the public and, in return, collect information from that same audience. The preliminary study presented here offers valuable insights into how social media may be used to improve food safety standards. Today, food safety is still a major health challenge in the country, which occasionally faces unsafe food supply chains, an increased number of food borne outbreaks, and poor hygiene education. Social media may be used as a very valuable tool for people to access important information and more knowledge about food safety. The limited-scope survey presented here was conducted over the western part of Saudi Arabia and included 295 individuals of both genders, among various age groups. Participants responded to an online questionnaire about their use of social media to obtain information about food safety. Results showed that social media was indeed a major outlet for individuals to access information on food safety, with the top-ranked social media platforms being WhatsApp (M = 2.99) followed by Snapchat (M = 3.72), YouTube (M = 4.08), Instagram (M = 4.46), and Facebook (M = 4.81). Additionally, we found that the most trusted sources of information was the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (72.6%) and the Saudi Ministry of Health (55.4%). Participants most frequently sought epidemiological information (52.5%), quantitative risk estimates (23.1%), and information on the various types of foodborne infections (15.3%); they preferred the information to be in video format (67.5%), articles (57.6%), infographics (55.3%). Trustworthiness clearly emerged from the survey as an important consideration for individuals when accessing food safety information on social media.

Dataset Information

The magnitude of COVID-19 related stress, anxiety and depression associated with intense mass media coverage in Saudi Arabia.

Publications

The magnitude of COVID-19 related stress, anxiety and depression associated with intense mass media coverage in Saudi Arabia.

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