(PS3-A15) The Effect of Social Media Subtle Communication on Beliefs About Mental Illness Trajectories

Many people with psychiatric symptoms do not seek treatment (Oliver et al., 2018) and when they do, 30-50% dropout prematurely (Roos & Werbart, 2012). One barrier to treatment seeking and uptake is the belief that nothing can be done to improve symptoms. Therefore, those who would potentially benefit may not seek treatment or it may be less effective for those who perceive symptoms as stable and innate. Carol Dweck (1999) coined the terms for fixed and malleable mindsets in the context of studying children’s beliefs regarding intelligence. Specifically, she found that children who viewed intelligence as a malleable feature of one’s personality that can be improved upon with effort performed better academically than those who believed intelligence is not amenable to change. Since this time, multiple studies have further corroborated and expanded on these findings, providing evidence for mindsets being associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety, negative emotionality, and psychopathology in general (De Castella et al., 2013; Tamir et al., 2007; Shroder et al., 2018).

Given the widespread use of social media to disseminate information about important issues, including psychological health, we sought to understand how the influence of social media communication regarding mental health impacts viewers’ beliefs about their own perceived role in mental illness recovery. Thus, we conducted an experimental study with 321 participants from a large Midwestern university. Participants were randomized into three conditions, fixed, malleable, or control, and viewed a series of fictious tweets. In the fixed condition, participants viewed tweet content presenting mental illness from a fixed mindset perspective (e.g., “I can’t wait for my seasonal depression to be over so that I can get back to my regular depression”). The malleable condition included tweet content presenting mental illness from a malleable mindset perspective (e.g., “user captioned, “I got this,” with a meme that read, “telling those anxious thoughts who’s really in control”). Finally, the control condition did not have any mental health content, but instead was a series of tweets that were generally positive in tone (e.g., “Got my mile time down to 9:20 after it being over 10. I am 10000% not a runner. I cannot breathe but I am so happy!”).

We hypothesized that participants in the fixed condition would be more pessimistic about the possibility of improving mental health trajectories than those in the malleable and control conditions. As hypothesized, one-way ANOVA analyses indicated that participants in the fixed condition believed that depression and anxiety are more chronic (M = 19.79, SD = 4.95) than those in the malleable condition (M = 17.77, SD = 4.90; F(2, 318) = 11.01, p < .001, d = .54). Additionally, participants in the fixed condition believed they had less personal agency over mental illness (M = 10.21, SD = 2.81) than those in both the malleable (M = 8.55, SD = 2.84) and control (M = 9.24, SD = 3.02; F(2, 318) = 9.00, p < .001, d = .59) conditions. These findings suggest that, even in brief exposures, social media content has the ability to impact our beliefs about ourselves and our abilities regarding mental illness, which has implications for both treatment seeking and uptake behaviors.