Article: Mental health surveillance after the terrorist attacks in Paris

The Black Oil

Picked this up via email, from The Lancet.

Although effective approaches exist for treating these consequences, no systematic attempts have been made to identify populations at risk early on to expeditiously mitigate them. Social media could help identify populations in need during and after disasters. Specifically, automated sentiment analysis can extract emotional reactions from these data, and space–time syndromic surveillance can effectively detect disease outbreaks.

No academic efforts to our knowledge have combined these approaches to identify areas of particularly pronounced emotional reactions as a way of anticipating post-disaster psychological need. Such an approach, if refined and done in real time, could help to rapidly identify geographically concentrated emotional reactions after traumatic events.

We therefore investigated the possibility of a space–time syndromic surveillance system for the emotional consequences of mass traumatic events based on social media data. We aimed to first extract basic emotions from Twitter for Paris between Friday, Nov 13, 2015, and Monday, Nov 16, 2015, and second, to detect clusters of these basic emotions in space and time.

We categorised basic emotions of Twitter users in Paris within the given timeframe. We detected clusters of fear and sadness around the attack sites after the disaster (appendix). We assumed that attention to potential threats is elevated in the aftermath of a disaster. Our results lent support to this assumption because we found a cluster of fear around three attack sites on Sunday, 2 days after the disaster.



The timeframe of the cluster overlapped with an incident in which a firecracker was heard near Place de la République that produced rumours about a further possible terrorist attack and fostered some panic. When the incidents were still fresh in the consciousness of the local population, many were showing respect and sorrow for the victims. This was also the case in our study, which found a geographic concentration of tweets reflecting sadness in the area of the attacks during the afternoon and night of the first Sunday after the attacks (appendix).

And

To our knowledge, this is the first report to show the potential for real-time syndromic surveillance to signal locations with concentrated emotional responses in the aftermath of a disaster. We showed that clusters of emotional reactions could be captured in space and time with a combination of sentiment analysis and retrospective space–time cluster detection based on recorded geotagged social media data. If refined and prospectively applied in real time, this approach could detect emerging areas of post-disaster emotional reactions and provide guidance for the provision of mental health services in affected areas.

First time I've seen anything written up in this way, i.e. using social media, to assess emotional responses to a disaster.

What sort of support can be rolled out during these sort of crisis situations, if needs are identified? Critical Incident Stress Debriefing interventions?

cranks

The Black Oil wrote: »

Picked this up via email, from The Lancet.



And



First time I've seen anything written up in this way, i.e. using social media, to assess emotional responses to a disaster.

What sort of support can be rolled out during these sort of crisis situations, if needs are identified? Critical Incident Stress Debriefing interventions?

Very interesting at first glance but I found myself almost immediately wondering if real-time capturing of stated emotional responses to such events (scared, hypervigilant etc) is not capturing the blatantly obvious. I cringed at the the idea of some kind of rapid response mental health intervention.
The evidence for rapid response CISD is equivocal and IMO is intuitively wrong. Personally, i feel a period of emotional numbing/dissociation/denial - call it what you will- is a necessary first step in the processing of intense threat etc. I'm inclined towards the hold-off on the MH professionals in the short to medium term in favour of social, noninvasive, social support with no requirement to talk or process emotions (family, clergy, cups of tea, emotional space, and quiet). There's time for the MH services later.
This is a very interesting look at CISD in the wake of the 911 attacks and worth digging out beyond this abstract if you can get it
http://m.psi.sagepub.com/content/4/2/45.short

dar100

cranks wrote: »

Very interesting at first glance but I found myself almost immediately wondering if real-time capturing of stated emotional responses to such events (scared, hypervigilant etc) is not capturing the blatantly obvious. I cringed at the the idea of some kind of rapid response mental health intervention.
The evidence for rapid response CISD is equivocal and IMO is intuitively wrong. Personally, i feel a period of emotional numbing/dissociation/denial - call it what you will- is a necessary first step in the processing of intense threat etc. I'm inclined towards the hold-off on the MH professionals in the short to medium term in favour of social, noninvasive, social support with no requirement to talk or process emotions (family, clergy, cups of tea, emotional space, and quiet). There's time for the MH services later.
This is a very interesting look at CISD in the wake of the 911 attacks and worth digging out beyond this abstract if you can get it
http://m.psi.sagepub.com/content/4/2/45.short

Would it not be better to intervene at the earliest opportunity, in order to mitigate possible PTSD experiences?

JuliusCaesar

Most people recover spontaneously from traumatic events within 6-8 weeks. Early intervention can backfire, badly.

The Black Oil

cranks wrote: »

Very interesting at first glance but I found myself almost immediately wondering if real-time capturing of stated emotional responses to such events (scared, hypervigilant etc) is not capturing the blatantly obvious. I cringed at the the idea of some kind of rapid response mental health intervention.

Sometimes you hear of a student suicide involving a second level pupil. Psychologists are usually brought into these situations. If it's a group setting maybe it's more beneficial to address it at that level rather than too much 1:1 in the immediacy of the traumatic event. I don't know, I don't have experience to comment, but I'm a little spectical of any sort of swooping in approach.

JuliusCaesar wrote: »

Most people recover spontaneously from traumatic events within 6-8 weeks. Early intervention can backfire, badly.

No doubt.