Disseminating brief video-based mental health interventions on Instagram: Reach, engagement, and real-world...

Childhood trauma (CT) profoundly impacts mental health. Negative attitudes and stigma surrounding mental health and trauma often deter survivors from seeking help. Previous research demonstrated that a brief video intervention significantly reduced stigma and enhanced openness to treatment among CT survivors. Given social media's pervasive role in young people's lives, Instagram offers a promising avenue for delivering evidence-based interventions. This study aimed to test the feasibility and acceptability of disseminating this intervention via Instagram.

Two consecutive campaigns targeted U.S. youth aged 18-24. The first campaign featured a human-narrated personal story video shown to reduce stigma among CT survivors, alongside a psychoeducational control video without social-contact elements. The second campaign aimed to replicate these findings and explore the feasibility of additional videos, including artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos. We assessed key engagement metrics: impressions (total views), reach (unique viewers), link clicks (engagement with treatment resources), and cost-per-click (CPC) for recruitment.

The campaigns generated approximately 997,000 impressions, reaching 387,068 Instagram users, resulting in 6417 link clicks. Using click-through rate (CTR), compared via two-proportion z-tests, as the primary comparative metric, the human-narrated intervention significantly outperformed the control videos on a per-impression basis in both campaigns, and on a per-reach basis against the 'About Me' control in Campaign 2, but not on a per-reach basis in Campaign 1 or against the psychoeducational control in Campaign 2. AI-generated videos showed significantly higher per-reach CTR than the human-narrated intervention in Campaign 2.

These findings suggest Instagram's potential to disseminate cost-effective interventions previously shown to reduce negative attitudes toward CT and encourage youth to seek help. Future studies should examine long-term effects on treatment-seeking behaviors in different populations.Clinical trial number: not applicable.