Increasing digitalization is associated with anxiety and depression: A Google Ngram analysis

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Sociology

Background:

• Global prevalence of anxiety disorders and depression is increasing.
• Societal risk factors studied are limited to socio-economic status, social capital, and unemployment, often relying on self-reports.
• Digitalization as a societal factor remains underexplored in relation to mental health trends.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of digitalization on societal levels of anxiety and depression.
• To utilize a linguistic big data approach for analyzing word frequency changes.
• To compare trends across six languages: British English, German, Spanish, Russian, French, and Italian.

Main Methods:

• Employed Google Books Ngram Viewer to access word frequencies from a large corpus (8 million books).
• Analyzed word frequencies for terms related to anxiety disorders, depression, and digitalization.
• Included 'religion' as a control construct and refined methods by excluding ambiguous terms.

Main Results:

• Significant increases in word frequency for anxiety, depression, and digitalization observed over the past 50 years (r = .79 to .89, p < .001).
• Strong positive correlations found between anxiety and depression word frequencies (r = .98, p < .001).
• Significant positive correlations identified between digitalization and both anxiety (r = .81, p < .001) and depression (r = .81, p < .001) word frequencies.

Conclusions:

• Digitalization emerges as a significant societal factor correlating with increased anxiety and depression.
• The linguistic big data approach provides a novel method for studying societal mental health trends.
• Findings suggest a need to consider digitalization's role in public health strategies and future research.