There is increasing pressure to rapidly shape policies and inform decision-making where robust evidence is lacking. This work aimed to explore the value of soft-intelligence as a novel source of evidence. We deployed an artificial intelligence based natural language platform to identify and analyze a large collection of UK tweets relating to mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A search strategy comprising a list of terms relating to mental health, COVID-19 and the lockdown was developed to prospectively identify relevant tweets via Twitter's advanced search application programming interface. We used a specialist text analytics platform to explore tweet frequency and sentiment across the UK and identify key topics of discussion for qualitative analysis. All collated tweets were anonymized.

We identified 380,728 tweets from 184,289 unique users in the UK from 30 April to 4 July 2020. The average sentiment score was fifty-two percent, suggesting overall positive sentiment. Tweets around mental health were polarizing, discussed with both positive and negative sentiment. For example, some people described how they were using the lockdown as a positive opportunity to work on their mental health, sharing helpful strategies to support others. However, many people expressed the damaging impact the pandemic (and resulting lockdown) was having on their mental health, including worsening anxiety, stress, depression, and loneliness.

The results suggest that soft-intelligence is potentially a useful source of evidence. The approach taken to identify and analyze this data may offer an efficient means of establishing key insights from the ‘public voice’ relating to critical health issues. However, there are still various limitations to consider concerning the technology and representativeness of the data. Future work to explore this type of evidence further, and how it might formally support decision-making processes, is recommended.

This project is funded by the NIHR [(HSRIC-2016-10009)/Innovation Observatory]. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.