The Impact Of Social Media Use On Public Depression Cognition And Help-Seeking Behavior

Depression is a serious mental disorder.There are about 95 million people suffering from depression in China.The lifetime prevalence of depression is 6.9 percent,but only about 30 percent of patients seek medical attention.The main reason for this is poor public awareness of depression.The Outline of "Healthy China 2030" Plan proposes that all media have to strengthen the promotion of health knowledge,promote health education by using new media,and strengthen the promotion of mental health knowledge among the whole people.Social media as an important channel for the public to obtain information is imperceptibly influencing the public's cognition,attitude and behavior.It's worthy of further exploration in this study to find out how the use of social media affects depression perception and help-seeking behavior and how to better use social media to spread depression information,promote public awareness of depression,and stimulate the awareness of seeking help.This study is carried out from the perspective of health communication.First of all,the study sorted out the current situation of depression information communication in social media from three aspects of communication subject,content and form,and summarized the role and existing problems of social media in the process of information communication.Then,the text of the conversation was obtained by selecting 21 social media users with the targeted sampling method to conduct the conversation.The study used the grounded theory analysis to encode the text and obtain key concepts of social media use,public depression cognition and help-seeking behavior.The study constructs a theoretical model of the influence of social media use on depression cognition and help-seeking behavior with KAP Theory,Social Cognition Theory,Health Belief Model and Theory of Planned Behavior.Finally,the study collected data through questionnaire survey.SPSS regression analysis was used to conduct data analysis to verify the influence of social media use on public depression cognition and help-seeking behavior.The study found that social media exposure positively affects the public's perceived knowledge and risk perception of depression,while it has a negative impact on stereotypes.Social media exposure can positively influence the intention to seek help through the incomplete mediating effects of perceived knowledge,risk perception and stereotype.The intention to seek help can further predict the actual help-seeking behavior.Social media trust has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between social media exposure and risk perception.On the basis of the above studies,from three perspectives of improving the public's perceived knowledge level,improving the public's perceived risk awareness and reducing the public's stereotype level,this study provides targeted suggestions for promoting the public's depression cognition and help-seeking behavior from three aspects of knowledge transmission,risk transmission and stigma removal.