Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
The emotional world of health online communities
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Sociable killers: understanding social relationships in an online first-person shooter game
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Co-viewing live TV with digital backchannel streams
Proceddings of the 9th international interactive conference on Interactive television
Paraphrastic sentence compression with a character-based metric: tightening without deletion
MTTG '11 Proceedings of the Workshop on Monolingual Text-To-Text Generation
Major life changes and behavioral markers in social media: case of childbirth
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
A framework for detecting public health trends with Twitter
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
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Emerging research has shown that social media services are being used as tools to disclose a range of personal health information. To explore the role of social media in the discussion of mental health issues, and with particular reference to insomnia and sleep disorders, a corpus of 18,901 messages - or Tweets - posted to the microblogging social media service Twitter were analysed using a mixed methods approach. We present a content analysis which revealed that Tweets that contained the word "insomnia" contained significantly more negative health information than a random sample, strongly suggesting that individuals were making disclosures about their sleep disorder. A subsequent thematic analysis then revealed two themes: coping with insomnia, and describing the experience of insomnia. We discuss these themes as well as the implications of our research for those in the interaction design community interested in integrating online social media systems in health interventions.