The impact of mental health social media posts on symptom reporting and self-diagnosis: Assessing the impact of concept breadth.

This study aims to examine the prevalence inflation hypothesis, which states that mental health awareness efforts could increase reports of mental health problems (Foulkes & Andrews, 2023). The mental health problem that will be focused on in this study is anxiety and the main outcomes will be a) state anxiety symptoms, b) trait anxiety symptoms and c) self-diagnosis of an anxiety disorder (all self-reported). The stimuli presented will be a series of images in a similar format to an Instagram post. This study will focus on whether outcomes vary depending on the specific content of awareness materials (i.e. the specific messaging about anxiety). Specifically, we will manipulate whether anxiety is described as a construct with a narrow ‘concept breadth’ (presenting anxiety as a rare disorder) or with a broad ‘concept breath’ (presenting anxiety as a common emotion). We will also examine whether any effects are moderated by baseline trait anxiety and explore any effects on intended help-seeking and mental health stigma.