key: cord-0873207-uk1sc5b0 authors: El-Gabalawy, O.; Kim, C.; Chen, A.; Kamal, S. title: Twitter Engagement of U.S. Psychiatry Residency Programs with Black Lives Matter and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) date: 2020-10-23 journal: nan DOI: 10.1101/2020.10.20.20215723 sha: 487e9a80e39dce03eb75960235e8b31e848007c2 doc_id: 873207 cord_uid: uk1sc5b0 Social media have become popular platforms to disseminate information, especially related to politicized topics such as BLM and COVID-19. To better understand how medical institutions have engaged with the social media discourse on BLM and COVID-19, we examined psychiatry residency programs' tweets in response to George Floyd's murder and during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Only 14% of the 249 evaluated psychiatry residency programs had Twitter accounts (we included programs with their own account or their affiliated psychiatry department account) indicating a substantial absence on social media. Of those programs, 78% tweeted at least once about COVID-19 (1,153 tweets) and 56% tweeted at least once about the BLM movement (117 tweets). The top three purposes of tweets were sharing media, posting about an event, and sharing a resource. Concerns about mental health have been raised across the nation in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. [1] [2] [3] [4] Social media, particularly Twitter, have become popular platforms to disseminate information, especially related to politicized topics such as BLM and COVID-19. To better understand how medical institutions have engaged with the social media discourse on BLM and COVID-19, we examined psychiatry residency programs' tweets in response to George Floyd's murder and during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. A list of 249 US psychiatry residency programs was taken from Doximity.com in November, 2019. We determined social media presence for each program by searching each program's website and using a Google search to identify Twitter accounts of the residency program or its affiliated psychiatry department. All tweets and re-tweets from January 1st to June 29, 2020 were scraped from the identified Twitter accounts. We established BLM & COVID-19 search terms (see supplement section for lists) by starting with a minimal set (e.g. "black lives matter" for BLM and "COVID" for COVID-19), and iterating to include commonly associated search terms found in the positive tweets (e.g. "quarantine"). We used COVID-19 search terms on tweets from January 1 to June 29, 2020 and BLM search terms on tweets from May 25 (date of George Floyd's murder) to June 29, 2020. Of the subset of tweets positive for a COVID-19 search term, we conducted a subsequent search using BLM terms to identify intersectional tweets. Two of us (C.J.K. and A.V.C.) reviewed the tweets and independently coded the data, generating a list of themes using a grounded theory approach. The two coders iteratively compared and refined All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted October 23, 2020. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.20.20215723 doi: medRxiv preprint themes to produce a final set of themes. Word and Excel (Microsoft Corp) was used to manage the data. Table 1 ). Of the tweets that shared media, the majority of them shared news articles (75%, 75/100) rather than videos (13.0%, 13/100), podcast or radio episodes (6.0%, 6/100), or journal articles (6.0%, 6/100) ( Table 2 ). Of the tweets that posted about an event, the majority posted about a protest or vigil (43.9%, 25/57) or a talk (31.6%, 18/57) (Table 3) . Notably, only two tweets that posted about an event were publicizing a training session (3.5%, 2/57) ( Table 3) . Comparing the BLM and COVID-19 tweets, several key differences emerged. The COVID-19 subset had close to 7 times as many tweets than the BLM subset sharing a resource (24.4%, 28/115, vs. 3.5%, 4/115) (Table 1) . However, the BLM subset had over 5 times as many tweets All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted October 23, 2020. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.20.20215723 doi: medRxiv preprint than the COVID-19 subset posting about an event (41.7%, 48/115, vs. 7.8%, 9/115) ( Table 1) . More than half of the BLM tweets posting about an event were publicizing a protest or vigil (52.1%, 25/48). Few psychiatry residency programs have an online presence through Twitter. Of those that do, more programs tweeted at least once about COVID-19 than BLM. Tweets primarily focused on sharing media, posting about an event, or sharing a resource. However, very few COVID-19 tweets had BLM-related content, and even fewer yet discussed the pandemic's disproportionate impact on Black communities and their mental health. Limitations include taking a 10% sample of COVID-19 tweets for qualitative analysis rather than a complete sample; and including BLM tweets for the month after George Floyd's murder although the BLM movement has continued past the end of June. Nevertheless, this study provides insight on how medical institutions, specifically residency programs, engage with current political discourse through social media. Findings from our study highlight the need to share resources to support mental health of Black communities through accessible forms of communication like Twitter. Future research is needed to better understand long-term engagement on social media by medical institutions regarding public health crises like police brutality and the pandemic. The authors declare no competing interests. OE and SK contributed to the compilation of all data. OE, CK, and AC performed the analysis of the data and writing of the manuscript. All authors edited and approved of the final manuscript. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted October 23, 2020. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.20.20215723 doi: medRxiv preprint Mental Health and the Covid-19 Pandemic Suicide Mortality and Coronavirus Disease 2019-A Perfect Storm? JAMA Psychiatry Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans: a population-based, quasi-experimental study Structural Racism, Social Risk Factors, and Covid-19 -A Dangerous Convergence for Black Americans No reuse allowed without permission. (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity