Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology

Abstract

Heavily used hashtags on Instagram and other platforms can indicate extensive public engagement with issues, events or collective experiences. This article extends existing research methods to paint a fuller picture of how people engage collectively with public issues online. Focussing on Instagram content often deemed ‘problematic’, we develop and test what we call a ‘hashtag practice’ approach. This approach targets the hashtag #depressed, and also moves beyond it to (a) incorporate the posts immediately preceding and following a root post, (b) more inclusively sample content associated with the hashtag to combat filtering bias, (c) consider collocated hashtags and (d) draw on contextual cues in the interplay between posts’ visual content, captions and profile management. The method shows the prevalence and significance of aesthetic and memetic practices, and caution in embodiment in mental health posts, revealing more diverse forms of engagement with mental health on Instagram than previous research suggests.