Exploring whether mental health crisis text conversations that include discussion of firearms differ from those without firearms.

Autor: Miller AB; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. Electronic address: abmiller@rti.org., Oppenheimer CW; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA., Chew RF; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA., Weitzel KJ; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA., D'Arcangelo B; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA., Barnes A; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA., Lowe A; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA., Yaros AC; RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Preventive medicine [Prev Med] 2023 Dec; Vol. 177, pp. 107783. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Nov 18.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2023.107783
Abstrakt: Background: Firearm violence represents a public health crisis in the United States. Yet, there is limited knowledge about how firearms are discussed in the context of mental health emergencies representing a major gap in the current research literature. This study addresses this gap by examining whether the content of mental health crisis text conversations that mention firearms differ from those that do not mention firearms in a large, unique dataset from a national crisis text line.
Methods: We examined data from over 3.2 million conversations between texters to Crisis Text Line and volunteer crisis counselors between September 2018 and July 2022. We used a study developed text classification machine learning algorithm that builds on natural language processing to identify and label whether crisis conversations mentioned firearms. We compared the frequency of psychosocial factors between conversations that mention firearms with those that did not.
Results: Results from a generalized linear mixed-effects model demonstrated that. conversations mentioning firearms more frequently were associated with suicide, racism, physical, sexual, emotional, and unspecified abuse, grief, concerns about a third party, substance use, bullying, gender and sexual identity, relationships, depression, and loneliness. Further, conversations mentioning firearms were less likely to be related to self-harm and eating/body image.
Conclusions: These results offer an initial glimpse of how firearms are mentioned in the context of acute mental health emergencies, which has been completely absent in prior literature. Our results are preliminary and help sharpen our understanding of contextual factors surrounding mental health emergencies where a firearm is mentioned.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
Externí odkaz: