Assessment of beliefs and attitudes about electroconvulsive therapy posted on Twitter: An observational study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is an effective and safe medical procedure that mainly indicated for depression, but is also indicated for patients with other conditions. However, ECT is among the most stigmatized and controversial treatments in medicine. Our objective was to examine social media contents on Twitter related to ECT to identify and evaluate public views on the matter.

Methods

We collected Twitter posts in English and Spanish mentioning ECT between January 1, 2019 and October 31, 2020. Identified tweets were subject to a mixed method quantitative-qualitative content and sentiment analysis combining manual and semi-supervised natural language processing machine-learning analyses. Such analyses identified the distribution of tweets, their public intere

SUBMITTER: de Anta L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9970148 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature