Assessing Signs of Mental Health Issues in Greece during the Pandemic via Google Trends Data Analysis

Abstract

A pandemic is of paramount concern for global health security, and it is imperative to assess the long-term psychosocial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to gain a comprehensive understanding of its implications. Monitoring the population’s mental health status can inform public health decision-makers of potential mental health deterioration on a national level, allowing them to recognize issues of substantive importance and design tailor-made interventions. Toward this end, the goal of this paper is to use Google Trends to track and compare pre-, during, and post-pandemic population-level mental health-related changes in Greece. The findings indicate a significant increase following the pandemic in searches related to “loneliness”, “anger”, and specific therapy methods and medications typically used for managing and treating anxiety, such as “psychologist”, “psychotherapy”, “meditation” and “anxiolytics”. A nearreal-time surveillance tool such as Google Trends has the potential to allow mental health experts to identify emerging mental health needs sooner and develop action plans for mental health promotion and prevention. Since discernible changes in mental health have yet to emerge at a population level, continued surveillance is required; Google Trends may prove to be a powerful data exploration and visualization infoveillance tool used as a complementary technique for “storytelling” regarding the “new” mental health pandemic.