“It’s cool to feel sad”: A thematic analysis of the social media experiences of university students who have self-harmed

Background: Suicide and self-harm rates amongst young people have been identified as a public mental health concern with emerging links to social media use. Aim: The current study aimed to qualitatively explore the social media experiences of university students who have self-harmed, as they have been identified as a group vulnerable to suicide. Method: Semi-structured interviews were completed at two time points with students aged 21 and under who have self-harmed whilst at university, with transcripts of interviews analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Results: Three organising themes were identified: 1) Instagram vs reality, 2) A double-edged sword, 3) Curating online spaces. The analysis provided a developmental overview of patterns across students’ experiences online, identifying negative social comparisons, the romanticisation of mental illness, and the development of their insight and rules to engage with social media in a helpful way. Conclusions: The study provided an insight into the evolution of the online lives of students who have self-harmed, highlighting key modifiable risk factors that researchers, policymakers and clinicians could meaningfully target to promote ‘digital hygiene’ and the reduction of potential harm from social media

A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Public Reddit and Tumblr Blog Posts on Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

Self-harm is a frightening phenomenon that affects adolescents and young adults all over the world. While non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) has a high prevalence rate, it is not a new behavior. One of the earliest documented cases of NSSI was in ancient Greece and it has gained popularity amongst adolescents. NSSI content appears consistently on pro-NSSI social media and blog websites. Social media’s ubiquity has profound impacts on people’s behavior; young people in particular spend hours consuming social media every day. The combination of NSSI behavior and social media creates debate and controversy. While some have argued that social media creates a community of people struggling with similar issues, others argue that social media is a space to perpetuate negativity and rumination. Even though research has attempted to understand and explain NSSI behavior, there has been little research on NSSI behavior and related language on social media. This dissertation examines selected pro-NSSI social media to explore the linguistic processes and psychological processes active in pro-NSSI social media posts. This study, which used a synchronic corpus linguistic design, has two arms; the first arm (A) focuses on pro-NSSI posts on Tumblr and the second arm (B) examined pro-NSSI posts on Reddit. Both the study on Tumblr and the study on Reddit asked the following questions: (1) What is the NSSI specific content word use of the individuals making posts? (2) What is the pattern of use of linguistic processes of the individuals making posts compared to the pattern that appears in blogs overall? (3) What is the pattern of use of psychological processes of the individuals making posts compared to the pattern that appears in blogs overall? The study used an API to collect public, pro-NSSI posts from both Reddit and Twitter that appeared between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017; these posts were then anonymized and analyzed. The API was instructed to scrape posts that: (a) monolingual English and (b) contain at least one term on a NSSI terms list compiled by the researchers. The API was instructed to eliminate user names, URLs, hashtags, location of the posts, posts from outside of the US, photographs, and foreign languages. When added together, the posts collected by the API for Research Arm A (Tumblr) had a total 330,868 total word count. For Research Arm B (Reddit), the corpus’ total word count was 228,172. The data was analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. For the first research question, the percentage of all words for each NSSI-specific category was reported. In addition, the raw count for each word in each category was listed in rank order. In terms of the second and third research questions, the following were reported for all categories except for emotional tone: (a) percentage of all words, (b) log likelihood statistic of the comparison of the NSSI corpus to general blog norms, and (c) log ratio of the comparison of the NSSI corpus to general blog norms. For the emotional tone category, the following were noted: (a) percentage of all words, (b) one sample z test of proportion with study results as p-hat and general blog norms as p0. When the Tumblr posts from Research Arm A were analyzed, the findings revealed that people posting their NSSI behaviors on public blogs are people who have a high desire to connect with others while sharing their pain and experience of numbness, and use high levels of negative emotional words. Overall, these results demonstrated that people posting on Tumblr about NSSI are hurting individuals reaching out for help. The findings for Research Arm B (Reddit) suggest that the posts were made in the mental state that was characterized by high levels of depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. When both research arms are considered as a whole, the results illustrated a profile of a young person who is struggling with managing intense negative emotions. The results from this study have implications for the clinical treatment by informing the counseling theories used to treat this population, transforming how counselors are trained in NSSI behaviors and investigating how research can further explore the nuances of language to have a better understanding of a difficult problem the plagues so many young people

A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Pro-Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and Pro-Anorexia Public Tumblr Posts Which Use Spanish (Un Analisis de Lingüística de Corpus de Publicaciones Pública que usan Español en Tumblr que Respaldan a las Pró Autolesiones No Suicidas y Pró-Anorexia)

On social media platforms and on blog sites, disordered behavior as a lifestyle choice is a growing trend that supports and promotes behaviors related to self-harm and anorexia. Web content advocating self-harm and anorexia can be found easily through search engines or can be concealed in the social media sphere through deliberately misused language and creative hashtags. Existing scholarly literature includes information regarding the language used on social media platforms and on blogs sites when material is written in English; however, there is little research exploring these phenomena as they are communicated in Spanish. The present study, which used a synchronic corpus linguistic design, has two arms, both of which examined public Tumblr posts. The first arm focused on pro-nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) posts, and the second arm scrutinized pro-anorexia (pro-ana) posts. Posts were scraped when they included Spanish language and/or hashtags and when they also utilized hashtags identifying the post as pro-NSSI or pro-ana. The research questions for the arms were as follows: First, in public Tumblr posts written in Spanish, what was the use rate of specific words for individuals posting content of a pro-NSSI or pro-ana nature? Second, in public pro-NSSI or pro-ana Tumblr posts written in English, what was the use rate of pronoun categories? Third, in public pro-NSSI or pro-ana Tumblr posts written in English, did the use rate of pronoun categories differ from norms for such posts? And, finally, in public pro-NSSI or pro-ana Tumblr posts written in Spanish, did the use rate of the psychological process categories differ from norms for such posts? Following an analysis of the data with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, the first arm of the study revealed the use of high levels of negative emotion words in the dominant language. The results also revealed possible depression, perceived lower social status and users’ efforts to distance themselves from their emotions when writing in the non-dominant language (English). Overall, these results demonstrated that people posting on Tumblr about NSSI are suffering and in need of help. The results of the second arm of the study revealed that reliance on pronouns increased users’ focus on people and objects, which has been linked to decreased likelihood of recovery. The psychological properties of the posts had a negative emotional tone and significant use of ingestion and health words, signaling potential symptoms of anorexia. Considering the extent of both research arms, the results show that these overlapping populations struggle to manage intense negative emotions. This research points to the benefits both of assessing bilingual clients for NSSI and anorexia symptoms and of evaluating their online posting behaviors. So, too, do these studies underscore the need for improved evidence-based treatment for trauma in bilingual individuals and the importance of devising Spanish and codeswitching blog norms to inform future research. Finally, these results can have profound implications for clinical treatment by informing the counseling theories used to treat these populations, by transforming how counselors are trained to assess and respond to NSSI and anorexia behaviors, and by investigating how research can reveal the nuances of language such that scholars better appreciate the difficult issues confronting teens and young adults

Evaluation of COVID-19 Spread Effect on the Commercial Instagram Posts using ANN: A Case Study on The Holy Shrine in Mashhad, Iran

The widespread deployment of social media has helped researchers access an enormous amount of data in various domains, including the the COVID-19 pandemic. This study draws on a heuristic approach to classify Commercial Instagram Posts (CIPs) and explores how the businesses around the Holy Shrine were impacted by the pandemic. Two datasets of Instagram posts (one gathered data from March 14th to April 10th, 2020, when Holy Shrine and nearby shops were closed, and one extracted data from the same period in 2019), two word embedding models – aimed at vectorizing associated caption of each post, and two neural networks – multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural network – were employed to classify CIPs in 2019. Among the scenarios defined for the 2019 CIPs classification, the results revealed that the combination of MLP and CBoW achieved the best performance, which was then used for the 2020 CIPs classification. It was found out that the fraction of CIPs to total Instagram posts has increased from 5.58% in 2019 to 8.08% in 2020, meaning that business owners were using Instagram to increase their sales and continue their commercial activities to compensate for the closure of their stores during the pandemic. Moreover, the portion of non-commercial Instagram posts (NCIPs) in total posts has decreased from 94.42% in 2019 to 91.92% in 2020, implying the fact that since the Holy Shrine was closed, Mashhad residents and tourists could not visit it and take photos to post on their Instagram accounts

Learning Disabilities

Learning disabilities are a heterogeneous group of disorders characterized by failure to acquire, retrieve, and use information competently. These disorders have a multifactorial aetiology and are most common and severe in children, especially when comorbid with other chronic health conditions. This book provides current and comprehensive information about learning disorders, including information on neurobiology, assessment, clinical features, and treatment. Chapters cover such topics as historical research and hypotheses of learning disorders, neuropsychological assessment and counselling, characteristics of specific disorders such as autism and ADHD, evidence-based treatment strategies and assistive technologies, and much more

Adab-International Conference on Information and Cultural Sciences “Cultural Literacy and Islam in the Post-Truth Society”

In the midst of current globalization and the development of science, various cultural problems and social gap among the people have become daily consumption. Lack of knowledge and illiteracy have led people to respond the dynamics of social and cultural changes differently. Thus, various issues related to cultural illiteracy, cultural shock, and being trapped into misleading information in many areas, have become serious problem lately. That is why, this millennial is sometimes called as disruptive era, in which truth has always been questioned. Concerning this, the Faculty of Adab and Cultural Sciences UIN Sunan Kalijaga considers that it is necessary to hold an international seminar to accommodate and communicate the researches, problems and thoughts related to the significance of cultural literacy in the development of the science, knowledge and civilization from local to international level. Focusing on the four scientific fields as the core of the faculty, namely Arabic Language and Literature, History of Islamic Culture, Library Science and English Literature, this annual conference is expected to be a forum for scientific synergy, strengthening strategy from the four majors related to cultural literacy, language, history and information. The purpose of this activity is to give opportunity for the researchers and academicians not only disseminating their researches and thoughts in the fields of adab and cultural sciences, but also updating policies of the related areas. This international conference also provides an overview of knowledge and trends of research with a global perspective related to information, language, history and culture. The theme of the conference this year is The Cultural Literacy and Islam in the Posttruth society. Here, the conference not only focuses on cultural literacy in Arabic and English studies but also touches the issues of trajectory of Islamic culture and civilization; contributions of the sciences and civilization to Indonesian Islam and world peace; strengthening Indonesian Islam through science of civilization; Information retrieval for preserving cultural heritage's purposes, etc. On behalf of faculty and committee, I would like express my deep appreciation and respect to the keynote speakers, invited speakers, presenters, participants and all or the parties who participate and contribute to this conference. Hopefully, this seminar would give much contribution not only for academicians and society but also for knowledge and humanity

Experiences of Adults who Disclose Self-harm to Non-professionals

Background: Research suggests that self-harm is often a private behaviour and many individuals do not disclose their self-harm. People who feel unable to disclose their self-harm have less opportunity to seek support. There is a paucity of research on adult self-harm disclosure experiences, with most existing studies recruiting adolescents. Aims: This study aimed to understand the expectations and experiences of adults who self-harm when they disclose to non-professionals. Methods: Ten participants (aged 26-51) were recruited through the NHS and a third sector organisation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and data was analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Four themes were identified; ‘The insular nature of self-harm’, ‘Imagined versus reality’, ‘Self-preservation’ and ‘New ways of relating’. Participants described self-harm as an insular behaviour, which created an inherent tension when considering disclosure; a social process. There were risks associated with self-harm disclosure, including stigma and losing control. Participants carefully considered the decision to disclose, experiencing high levels of ambivalence about disclosing and spending extended periods rehearsing potential disclosures. In reality, disclosure experiences were sometimes very different, with participants describing a range of positive and negative responses. Making such risky personal disclosures meant self-preservation was key, both during and after a disclosure. Participants found new ways of relating to their disclosure recipients and evaluated future potential disclosures depending on the response received. Most participants had experienced negative responses, which caused distress and curtailed future disclosures, highlighting a need for improved public awareness of supportive responses to disclosures of self-harm. Discussion: This study highlighted the personal risks and highly variable responses people experience when disclosing self-harm to a family member, friend or colleague. Helpful ways of responding to self-harm disclosures were highlighted by participants in this study and guidance could be published so that non-professionals can be informed and prepared for having conversations about self-harm

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-harm and suicidal behaviour: update of living systematic review

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused considerable morbidity, mortality and disruption to people’s lives around the world. There are concerns that rates of suicide and suicidal behaviour may rise during and in its aftermath. Our living systematic review synthesises findings from emerging literature on incidence and prevalence of suicidal behaviour as well as suicide prevention efforts in relation to COVID-19, with this iteration synthesising relevant evidence up to 19th October 2020.Method: Automated daily searches feed into a web-based database with screening and data extraction functionalities. Eligibility criteria include incidence/prevalence of suicidal behaviour, exposure-outcome relationships and effects of interventions in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Outcomes of interest are suicide, self-harm or attempted suicide and suicidal thoughts. No restrictions are placed on language or study type, except for single-person case reports. We exclude one-off cross-sectional studies without either pre-pandemic measures or comparisons of COVID-19 positive vs. unaffected individuals.Results: Searches identified 6,226 articles. Seventy-eight articles met our inclusion criteria. We identified a further 64 relevant cross-sectional studies that did not meet our revised inclusion criteria. Thirty-four articles were not peer-reviewed (e.g. research letters, pre-prints). All articles were based on observational studies.There was no consistent evidence of a rise in suicide but many studies noted adverse economic effects were evolving. There was evidence of a rise in community distress, fall in hospital presentation for suicidal behaviour and early evidence of an increased frequency of suicidal thoughts in those who had become infected with COVID-19.Conclusions: Research evidence of the impact of COVID-19 on suicidal behaviour is accumulating rapidly. This living review provides a regular synthesis of the most up-to-date research evidence to guide public health and clinical policy to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on suicide risk as the longer term impacts of the pandemic on suicide risk are researched