#MentalHealthArt: How Instagram artists promote mental health awareness online

Objectives: Instagram artwork about mental illness was examined to learn how artists promote awareness about mental health and mental illness. Study design: Mixed methods predictive and descriptive analyses were conducted on a public dataset of artwork posts from Instagram. Methods: One thousand art images were classified by media (painting, drawing, collage, photograph, digital art, printmaking, sculpture, jewelry, or other) and style (representational, nonrepresentational, and functional). Text captions were clustered using latent semantic analysis. Predictive modeling was used to determine whether the frequency of online community response to posts (likes and comments) varied by artwork features or tagged mental health condition. Results: Results suggest that artists using mental health art hashtags most often posted two-dimensional, representational art with text descriptions about emotions and personal experience. However, the minority of images of functional art objects received the most frequent number of community responses. Conclusions: Findings suggest that artists may use informational and commercial strategies to engage online communities and promote mental health awareness. (C) 2021 The Royal Society for Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study found that artists on Instagram mostly posted representational two-dimensional art with emotional text descriptions when promoting mental health awareness. Surprisingly, functional art objects received the highest number of community responses despite being in the minority.