Trends in mental health googling

For good or ill, google.com plays a growing role in all aspects of life, including mental health. This is true for professionals, who may google medical literature, diagnoses, ¹ patients ² and, one supposes (as this is not yet supported in the literature), google each other. Patients, their families and other interested parties are googling too.

It is now possible, via Google trends (www.google.com/trends) and its sister Insights for Search (www.google.com/insights/search/) to obtain information about the relative frequency of Google searches for various terms. Comparisons can be made between search terms over time (since 2004) and between geographical areas. Clearly, mental health-related searches are not uncommon. Worldwide, in the period from July 2008 to July 2009, ‘depression’ was searched for nearly as often (approximately 84% as frequently) as ‘Barack Obama’.

‘Depression’ as a term is googled five times more often than ‘schizophrenia’. This is presumably for a myriad of reasons – its use as an economic and meteorological term among others – but it possibly reflects its greater prevalence.

‘Suicide’ searches occur at about the 80% of the frequency of depression searches. Small numbers of searches are made for topics such as ‘suicide how to’ and ‘suicide methods’ (approximately 30 times less frequent than searches for the term suicide).

‘Bulimia’ is a search term of modestly declining interest over the past 5 years, whereas the concern expressed by various quarters about the ‘pro ana’ movement seems justified because in the UK and Ireland, for every three searches for ‘anorexia’ there is one search for ‘pro ana’. Perhaps French women ‘do not get fat’ ³ because France is the country in which ‘pro ana’ searches are the most popular.

Finally, one can deduce from Google that advertising does work, as people google trade names far more commonly than generic names for drugs: since 2004, ‘Prozac’ was googled four times more frequently than ‘fluoxetine’.