Mental Health: The Data
Hey, Tumblr! We hope the week two prompts for Mental Health Month are treating you well. In the spirit of the theme, posting it for each other, we wanted to celebrate one of the most helpful communities out there: yours. You’ve helped shape Tumblr into an incredible community for support. To take a look into exactly how it’s flourished over the years, we teamed up with Fandometrics (@thefandometrics) to bring you some sweet, sweet data.
How you talk about mental health
Discussion around #mental health has steadily grown year over year since 2013, with a 248% uptick of original posts and reblogs made between 2013 and 2016. In that same time span, original posts and reblogs about #therapy increased 29%. Much of that conversation was rooted in real people sharing real stories. Emotional and honest stories, like how therapy can help you better understand your life, how to say good-bye to the wrong therapist, or the difficulty of making the sometimes daunting decision to begin therapy for the first time.
There has also been a significant rise in people seeking ways to take care of themselves. The self-care movement has seen huge increases in searches (733%) and original posts (567%) between 2013 and 2016. Over the past six months, we’ve seen total engagement (searches, original posts, reblogs, and likes) around the #self-care tag spike with correlations to holidays and events in the news:
240% increase the day after the US Presidential Election
321% in the days following Christmas and Hanukkah
561% in the days leading up to the Inauguration, and
342% in the days following Valentine’s Day.
Anatomy of a post
To get a better understanding of what the public-facing conversations consist of, we looked at the top posts for the #mental health, #positivity, and #self-care tags from the past few years. We noticed a few trends that continued to appear over and over again:
Masterposts, a one-stop shop of information on topics like learning new hobbies, treating yourself on a budget, and resources for different mental health issues continually pop up in these tags.
Doodles like @thelatestkate’s positive messages illustrated with cats or @gemmacorrell’s Self Care Reward Stickers are a Tumblr favorite. There’s also been a neato collaborative trend where someone doodles a text post made by someone else, like this art of living by cat principles, by @bisexualpiratequeen and @skunkaru.
Text Art like @sexioto’s reminder to take your meds and @peytonfulford’s message of more self love turn the text itself into art. In the mental health space, text art most frequently comes in the form of reminders, like to stay hydrated and to make yourself a priority.
Make your dash more positive
Because this is all about posting it for each other, here are a few great blogs to make your Tumblr experience more positive and healthy:
Positive Vibes (@posiviibes) provides positive and friendly text art in soothing colors.
LGBT+ Positivity (@goodpositivitylgbt) focuses on messages of positivity and validation for the LGBT+/MOGAI community.
Why Did You Feel Proud Today? (@todayifeltproud), a space to submit your accomplishments, big and small.
For more follow inspiration, check out our roundup from last week. We’ll be posting more each Friday this month. Keep sharing your stories, Tumblr, this month and every month.
