Impact of a mass media mental health campaign on psychiatric emergency department visits

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Despite the high prevalence of mental illnesses and addictions, treatment rates remain low. In April 2010, a regional mass media campaign was implemented to increase awareness of mental health services in central Toronto, Canada. We studied the impact of this campaign on rates of psychiatric emergency department (PED) visits among all hospital emergency departments (EDs) located in Toronto. DESIGN:Monthly PED visit totals were obtained for all Toronto EDs from April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2012. The campaign's impact on visit rates was measured using interrupted time series analysis and a difference-in-difference estimator. We conducted pre-and post-campaign analyses to examine whether volume increases were explained by specific diagnostic categories and/or new presentations (new patients with no prior PED visits), and to examine geographic trends. CONCLUSIONS: Mass media campaigns promoting mental health and psychiatric services can affect health care-seeking behaviour and utilization. Our findings have implications for system-level service planning, which should anticipate volume increases when public mental health campaigns are being considered. RESULTS:KEY WORDS: Health campaign; psychiatry; mental health; addictions; emergency services; interrupted time series analysis La traduction du résumé se trouve à la fin de l'article.

Role of Frontostriatal Connectivity in Adolescents With Excessive Smartphone Use

“…Adolescents are more likely to exhibit problematic smartphone use patterns after substituting a smartphone for the Internet ( 62 ). In this study, we identified that higher withdrawal symptoms were related to higher cortisol concentrations in adolescents with SP compared to HC.…”

Youth Mental Health Services Utilization Rates After a Large-Scale Social Media Campaign: Population-Based Interrupted Time-Series Analysis

“…Given the broad reach of social media, it has been leveraged as a communication mechanism for a range of different health interventions, including smoking cessation [ 1 ], alcohol awareness [ 2 ], HIV prevention [ 3 ], childhood obesity [ 4 ], sexual health practices [ 5 ], and mental health awareness [ 6 ]. However, it is not certain whether these types of social media campaigns actually influence the behaviors of intended audiences [ 7 , 8 ] or the health care system in measurable ways [ 9 ]. Research completed to date provides an incomplete picture regarding the impact of social media used in health campaigns [ 10 , 11 ].…”

“…Research completed to date provides an incomplete picture regarding the impact of social media used in health campaigns [ 10 , 11 ]. Currently, we know that traditional mass media health campaigns conveyed by television, radio, print advertisements, and outdoor media can generate reasonably effective results at the population level, especially when multiple media interventions are used to target an episodic situation (eg, vaccination) [ 9 , 12 ]. What remains unclear is whether large-scale health awareness campaigns underpinned primarily by social media messaging can also generate measureable behavior change at the population level, especially around sensitive topics such as mental illness and its related stigma.…”

“…Despite the success of Bell Let’s Talk and other similar mental health or antistigma campaigns [ 9 , 19 , 20 ], limited research has focused on evaluating the impact on behavior change. Instead, previous research has focused on evaluating campaign awareness by the public and resulting attitude changes and knowledge uptake [ 19 - 23 ].…”

“…Recent evaluation of Bell Let’s Talk by Harris/Decima has suggested that the campaign was successful at decreasing stigma and increasing personal awareness in a random telephone survey of Canadian adults (N=1007) over a 5-year period (2011-2015) [ 24 ]; however, no examination of the campaign’s influence on behavior change at population level has been undertaken. To our knowledge, population-level behavior change of people in response to a mass media mental health campaign has only been addressed in one study [ 9 ], and no known studies exist where social media was used as a primary mechanism of intervention dissemination.…”