Analysis of Suicide-related Tweets During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Title:Analysis of Suicide-related Tweets During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Volume: 5

Author(s): K.D.S. Balasooriya, R.A.H.M. Rupasingha*B.T.G.S. Kumara

Affiliation:

• Department of Economics and Statistics, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka, Belihuloya, Sri Lanka

Abstract: Background: The COVID-19 virus started in 2019 and badly affected the different sectors of many countries around the world. Based on this, financial difficulties, loss of loved ones, sudden anger, relationships, family disputes, and psychological distress increased, and individuals were stalled from carrying out their lifestyle in a normal way, and some individuals were even motivated to commit suicide.

Objective: It is important to reduce the number of suicides and identify the reasons for this situation. Through this research, the focus is on identifying the main topics discussed relevant to suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: Individuals use Twitter, a social media platform, to share their ideas freely and publically. We collected 9750 primary data through Twitter API (Application Programming Interface). After preprocessing and feature extraction by TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency), we applied the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) topic modeling algorithms to identify topics.

Results: Based on the LDA results, we extracted ten different topics under the three themes, such as the impact of COVID-19, human feelings, getting support, and having awareness. Intertopic Distance Map, Most Salient Terms, and Word Clouds Visualization are used to check the results. The coherence score and perplexing value are used to measure how interpretable the extracted topics are to humans. PLSA also extracted 25 topics with their probabilities, and Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence was used to check the results.

Conclusion: We were able to gain insight into human emotions and the main motivations behind suicide attempts using the topics we extracted. Expert feedback proved that LDA results were better than PLSA. Based on that, we found the main impact of COVID-19 on human lives, how human feelings were changed positively and negatively during that period, what supporting and awareness methods people used, and what they preferred. The required measures can then be taken by those responsible authorities and individuals to prevent, reduce, and get ready for this kind of suicidal incident in the future.

Cite this article as:

Balasooriya K.D.S., Rupasingha R.A.H.M.*, Kumara B.T.G.S., Analysis of Suicide-related Tweets During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Coronaviruses 2024; 5 () : e250324228302 . https://dx.doi.org/10.2174/0126667975296097240321060634