Examining the relationship between COVID-19 and suicide in media coverage through Natural Language Processing analysis

• Hugo J. Bello ^[1] ; Nora Palomar-Ciria ^[2] ; Celia Lozano ^[3] ; Carlos Gutierrez-Alonso ^[4] ; Enrique Baca-García ^[5]
  1. [1] Department of Applied Mathematics, Universidad de Valladolid, Soria, Spain
  2. [2] Servicio de Psiquiatría, Complejo Asistencial Universitario de Soria, Soria, Spain
  3. [3] Department of Data & Analytics, Bosonit, Logrono (La Rioja), Spain
  4. [4] Department of Artificial Intelligence, Sermes CRO, Madrid, Spain
  5. [5] Department of Psychiatry, Hospital Universitario Fundacion Jim enez Díaz, Madrid, Spain; INSERM Unit 1061, Montpellier, France; CHU Nimes and University of Montpellier, France; Department of Psychiatry, Universidad Autonoma, Madrid, Spain

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• Localización: European journal of psychiatry, ISSN 0213-6163, Vol. 38, Nº 1, 2024
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpsy.2023.100227
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  • Background and objectives: Suicide is a major public health concern, media can influence its awareness, contagion, and prevention. In this study, we evaluated the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and suicide in media coverage through Natural Language Processing analysis (NPL).

    Methods: To study how suicide is depicted in news media, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data techniques were used to analyze news and tweets, to extract or classify the topic to which they belonged.

    Results: A granger causality analysis showed with significant p-value that an increase in covid news at the beginning of the pandemic explains a later rise in suicide-related news. An analysis based on correlation and structural causal models show a strong relationship between the appearance of subjects “health” and “covid”, and also between “covid” and “suicide”.

    Conclusions: Our analysis also uncovers that the inclusion of suicide-related news in the category health has grown since the outbreak of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an inflection point in the way suicide-related news are reported. Our study found that the increased media attention on suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic may indicate rising social awareness of suicide and mental health, which could lead to the development of new prevention tools.