Longitudinal Analysis of Self-Representation of Users Diagnosed with Affective and/or Anxiety Disorders on Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing our informal interactions, professional discourses, and their structure. On social media platforms, users publish virtual self-representations, which may be related to "real-life" events and changes. The COVID-19 pandemic brought sweeping changes worldwide, including at the level of society as a whole. During this research, self-representative photos and videos were analyzed on Facebook or Instagram over three years, from the pre-pandemic period to the post-peak period of the fourth and fifth waves. The analysis covers three groups: the members of the first had an official diagnosis of one of the specified common anxiety or affective disorders; the members of the second group did not have such a diagnosis, but based on their symptoms, they suspected that they might have such mental illnesses; and the members of the third group had neither an official nor a self-suspected diagnosis. In addition to the content analysis, questionnaire data were collected twice, during which all participants filled out the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). In this way, not only the changes in the patterns of self-representation during the pandemic were highlighted, but also the correlations with existing or suspected anxiety or affective disorders – and the presence of anxiety or depression symptoms independent of diagnosis, to contribute to the scientific knowledge of the COVID pandemic's short- and long-term socio-psychological effects (Sándor, 2023).