Mental health in college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: a text mining approach

The great amount of posts made by Peruvian college students in social media regarding the deterioration of their mental health drew attention to what could be done to solve this issue. Thus, the objective of this study was to analyze posts from college students and classify the emotions they express regarding topics like mental health, the COVID-19 pandemic, political and economic crisis. 60,790 posts from Facebook and Twitter from Peruvian college students were extracted and preprocessed, ending as 33,103. Applying the K-Means method, nine clusters were obtained. With the assistance of two psychologists from the Universidad del Pacifico, these clusters were tagged corresponding to their main theme. The main obtained insight is that college students from Peru expressed worry about the pandemic and its effects on the population’s mental health, disconformity about the Peruvian political crisis, concern about Peru’s future, the importance of a social media channel to express anonymously their ideas and the growing need of psychological counseling to deal with mental health issues. In conclusion, this study provides a full view on how college students express their feelings about how they live everyday with stressful situations like the COVID-19 pandemic and political crisis in Peru while dealing with academic and personal worries, all at the same time.