Analysing Social Media Data to Understand Youth Mental Health Discourse in Nigeria

Social media discussions about mental health among Nigerian youth provide unstructured but valuable data for understanding stigma, awareness levels, and help-seeking behaviour that complement traditional survey approaches. This study analysed Twitter and Instagram posts related to mental health from Nigerian youth-oriented accounts and hashtags over a six-month period in 2023. Data collection using the Twitter API and Instagram scraping yielded 41,200 text posts after filtering by language and geographic indicators. Text preprocessing included code-switch handling for Pidgin English expressions and bilingual content. Sentiment analysis using a fine-tuned RoBERTa model classified post polarity, while topic modelling with BERTopic identified recurring themes. Seven major themes emerged: personal mental health experiences, stigma and social reactions, help-seeking behaviour, professional therapist access, school and academic stress, family relationship dynamics, and COVID-19 long-term mental health effects. Sentiment was predominantly negative for stigma-related posts and positive for posts discussing therapy access. Urban users in Lagos and Abuja contributed 58.6 percent of posts despite representing a minority of the youth population. Awareness of professional mental health services was mentioned in only 14.3 percent of posts, suggesting a knowledge gap. The study demonstrates the feasibility of social listening as a complement to traditional mental health epidemiology. Recommendations include informing national mental health communication strategy with these social data insights, and expanding digital mental health literacy campaigns to secondary cities and rural areas.

Keywords: social media analytics, mental health discourse, Nigerian youth, sentiment analysis, BERTopic