Big data in adolescent psychiatry: Do patients share their psychiatric symptoms on social networking sites?

Background: Fascinating developments in big data technologies and unprecedented diffusion of social networking sites (SNSs) generate unseen opportunities for scientific fields, including psychiatry. This study focuses on the use of SNSs by adolescent psychiatric patients and the potential use of SNS-generated data to help medical practitioners diagnose and treat patients’ mental health. Our objective is to understand and measure the psychiatric and individual conditions in which symptom-sharing occurs on SNSs and the frequency of these conditions. Based on literature, we hypothesized that the perceived value of social network sites positively affects adolescents’ sharing of symptoms on these sites. Subjects and methods: An empirical test of this hypothesis was conducted with a survey of 224 adolescents admitted to a psychiatry clinic in Turkey. The hypothesis was tested using a hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Results: The perceived value of SNSs explained an additional 37.8% of variation in symptom sharing on SNSs above and beyond the control variables, which are gender, age, type of disorder, and amount of internet and SNS use. The findings suggested that adolescents share symptoms on SNSs only if they attribute value to the SNSs that they use. We also found that 72% of adolescents in our sample shared their symptoms on SNSs. Conclusions: There is an attractive opportunity for information technology companies to develop, together with health professionals; data analytics that are able to detect symptoms to support psychiatric diagnoses and pave the way for big-data enabled personalized medicine.