Social Media and the Diagnosis of Mental Illness 18 Jun 2012

While much has been written recently about the dangers of internet use, new research seems to suggest a potential role for social media in assisting with the diagnosis of mental disorders. Last week, The Guardian reported on a study done at the University of Leeds where researchers found an association between the frequency and pattern of internet use and depression, and this week theNeurocritic has written an interesting post about how a dramatic increase in texting (not to be confused with hypertexting of course) is a modern version of hypergraphia, which can be a sign for a manic episode.

And certainly the evidence for manic/hypomanic hypergraphia has been plainly obvious for as long as the internet has existed. There are thousands of bipolar bloggers and Tweeters and Facebook users and online journalers before that. Unlike PubMed, Google Blog Search returns 3,670 hits for bipolar hypergraphia and 4,230 hits for manic hypergraphia. And those are just the posts that use the term hypergraphia. One could envision a study on quantitative changes in written output on Twitter or blogs as a possible sign of bipolar cycling.

(Image by Jhaymesisviphotography)

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