The objective of the study was to explore how the awareness of psychotic disorders varies with different demographics, like gender, age, education and ethnic affinity on social media across each of the states of United States. The Facebook ad audience API, which returns an estimate of reach, when queried with demographic parameters like gender, age, education level, region, ethnic affinity and target interest was used in this study. The target interest in our study was Psychosis and psychotic disorders like Schizoaffective Disorder, Hallucination, Schizophrenia Awareness and Paranoid Schizophrenia. The API-returned statistic was roughly validated against the Pew tally of adult Facebook users in the United States. In addition, we used Government's Mental Health Services Administration data for the count of state-wide mental health institutions, Census data for population and Human Development Index data. We did descriptive statistical analysis on the data, computed correlation metrics and fit regression models for the psychosis-related interest counts with the above parameters. The variation and quantitative association of awareness of psychotic disorders on Facebook, with different demographic parameters, was an interesting outcome of the study.
The SocWeB Lab's mission is to develop novel computational techniques, and technologies powered by these techniques, to responsibly and ethically employ social media in quantifying, understanding, and improving our mental health and well-being.
