ArticleJMIR mental health2019
Seasonality Patterns of Internet Searches on Mental Health: Exploratory Infodemiology Study.
Article in JMIR mental health, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stigma and Misinformation About Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on Tiktok and Instagram: Content Analysis Using #ASD, #Autism and #ASDinfo.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Promises and Pitfalls of Internet Search Data in Mental Health: Critical Review.JMIR mental health · 2025Review
- Predicting physical and mental health status through interview-based evaluation of work stress: initial attempts to standardize the interviewing method.Industrial health · 2024Article
- The 2022 Summer record-breaking heatwave and health information-seeking behaviours: an infodemiology study in Mainland China.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Evaluating the Impact of Mask Mandates and Political Party Affiliation on Mental Health Internet Search Behavior in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Generalized Additive Mixed Model Framework.Journal of medical Internet 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
- What's hot and what's not in lay psychology: Wikipedia's most-viewed articles.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Using the COVID-19 Pandemic to Assess the Influence of News Affect on Online Mental Health-Related Search Behavior Across the United States: Integrated Sentiment Analysis and the Circumplex Model of Affect.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Covid and mental health in America.PloS one · 2022Article
- The impacts of the "4+7" pilot policy on the volume, expenditures, and daily cost of Serotonin-Specific Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) antidepressants: A quasi-experimental study.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2022Article
- Searching for Mental Health Services: Search Strings and Information Acquisition.Journal of technology in behavioral science · 2022Article
- Mental Health Interest and Its Prediction during the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Google Trends.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Differential Susceptibility to the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Working Memory, Empathy, and Perceived Stress: The Role of Cortisol and Resilience.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Utilizing Google Trends to Assess Worldwide Interest in Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Commonly Associated Treatments.Digestive diseases and sciences · 2021Article
- What Motivates Internet Users to Search for Asperger Syndrome and Autism on Google?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- Trends in Web Searches About the Causes and Treatments of Autism Over the Past 15 Years: Exploratory Infodemiology Study.JMIR pediatrics and parenting · 2020Article
- Flattening the Mental Health Curve: COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Orders Are Associated With Alterations in Mental Health Search Behavior in the United States.JMIR mental health · 2020Article
- Article
- COVID-19 pandemic and mental health in Spain: An analysis of their relationship using Google Trends.Spanish journal of psychiatry and mental healthArticle
- Trends in Spanish-language Google searches on mental health issues in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Revista Colombiana de psiquiatriaArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe study of seasonal patterns of public interest in psychiatric disorders has important theoretical and practical implications for service planning and delivery. The recent explosion of internet searches suggests that mining search databases yields unique information on public interest in mental health disorders, which is a significantly more affordable approach than population health studies.
objectiveThis study aimed to investigate seasonal patterns of internet mental health queries in Ontario, Canada.
methodsWeekly data on health queries in Ontario from Google Trends were downloaded for a 5-year period (2012-2017) for the terms "schizophrenia," "autism," "bipolar," "depression," "anxiety," "OCD" (obsessive-compulsive disorder), and "suicide." Control terms were overall search results for the terms "health" and "how." Time-series analyses using a continuous wavelet transform were performed to isolate seasonal components in the search volume for each term.
resultsAll mental health queries showed significant seasonal patterns with peak periodicity occurring over the winter months and troughs occurring during summer, except for "suicide." The comparison term "health" also exhibited seasonal periodicity, while the term "how" did not, indicating that general information seeking may not follow a seasonal trend in the way that mental health information seeking does.
conclusionsSeasonal patterns of internet search volume in a wide range of mental health terms were observed, with the exception of "suicide." Our study demonstrates that monitoring internet search trends is an affordable, instantaneous, and naturalistic method to sample public interest in large populations and inform health policy planners.
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