Conversations Reshaping Mental Health

CONSUMER INSIGHTS

Catalyzed by recent events, mental health issues in the public have skyrocketed and triggered newfound attention on both the causes and many potential solutions to these issues. As the spotlight remains on mental health, brands will need to grasp the different elements driving the conversation in order to support innovative progress.

It’s hardly breaking news that the events of the last few years have put quite a strain on people’s mental state and emotional wellbeing. However, the extents of this strain and its dispersion across the world is staggering. According to a 2022 study from the World Health Organization, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic alone triggered a 25% increase in reported anxiety and depression worldwide.

And while these mounting struggles have been taxing, they have also played a large part in casting a stronger light than ever before on the importance of mental health. As people around the world have reshaped their day-to-day lives around global events, greater awareness, acceptance, and concern for peoples’ mental state has grown precipitously, resulting in increased attention and discussion across industries, demographic segments, and society at large.

Mental Health topics to watch in 2022

In progressing these mental health discussions, 2022 and beyond will be critical: as the world grapples with huge challenges, investing in better mental health solutions needs to be part of the plan. In fact we’re increasingly realizing the value of prioritizing mental health when we talk about everything from the pandemic to economic revitalization to healthcare reform to environmental protection.

As it is becoming more and more crucial to understand how the mental health crisis will evolve, we launched a specific Focus on our Nextatlas platform to help brands and agencies to get a grasp on the full extents of this sweeping issue and key in on strategies to address this poignant topic.

Designed specifically to give you concrete directions in this complex landscape, we looked at Mental Health from a series of individual angles to provide a holistic picture you can trust. And the picture we found was one of stable growth over the last year and, more importantly, continued growth in the coming months.

The timeline is an aggregation of all 4 themes; it offers an overview of the topic's development at large

The 4 facets of Mental Health

Further, through collected Nextatlas data, we highlighted 4 thematic areas that together paint a sweeping portrait of the conversation surrounding mental health:

Mind in crisis: the causes and reasons for our perceived condition as we have been forced to look inwards.
Collective Wellness: possible paths to rediscovering the world and finding new paths to comfort within it.
Mind-Body Wellness: a journey to physical, emotional, and spiritual healing and reconnecting with oneself.
Brain health: from neurotech to food indulgence, multiple ways to appease one's brain.

The pie chart illustrates the relative weight of each theme on our aggregated view of Mental Health.

Even more, informed by our constantly updating data stream, the Focus tracks the relative contribution of each thematic area to the overall topic as well as their individual future growth forecasts. So, you’ll be able to understand what the most important driver is today and where it's headed to clearly and successfully set your future strategies.

Keeping mental health awareness and solutions at the core of innovation promises to not only keep brands on the pulse of the public, but also offers a chance to deliver real positive change. However, driving this change requires a more nuanced and studied approach to tackling these big issues; being able to identify the weak signals and specific opportunities to accelerate innovation and engagement is a necessary and invaluable asset.

To make sure we keep our sources out of the mainstream and relevant to trend foresight, this expansion is constrained in a number of ways. By placing parameters on follower counts, prevalence of spam and sponsored posts, and more, we are able to isolate profiles with knowledge and cultural resonance while avoiding noisy and misleading influencers.

Beyond these controls, we leverage our machine learning capacity to track and filter for users who are consistently ahead of the pack; a behind-the-scenes prediction scoring allows our AI to prioritize the users and profiles who been historically prescient in these field. By placing these metrics and prioritizationson the hundreds of thousands of profiles in our community, we can ensure our data is indeed reflective of the consumers consistently breaking new ground and shifting the market - a big reason why our trend research can boast a 93% prediction accuracy.

Curious what theme is driving the bulk of conversation right now? Want to know why “Collective wellness” is growing faster than any other thematic area? Keep an eye out for our Mental Health Focus to find out.

Translate Trends Into Actionable Insights

Want to know what are the emerging trends shaping the future of Mental Health? Discover more on Nextatlas platform!

Trend lines, data, and information described in this article emerge from the ongoing analysis performed by Nextatlas on its global observation pool made of innovators, early adopters, industry insiders expressing their views on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit.

To learn more about our AI, discover Nextatlas Methodology here

Jan 25, 2022