"It's another gay disease": an intersectional qualitative approach contextualizing the lived experiences of young gay, bisexual, and other sexual minoritized men in the United States during the mpox outbreak.

BACKGROUND: The U.S. mpox outbreak in 2022 introduced new and exacerbated existing challenges that disproportionately stigmatize gay, bisexual, and other sexual minoritized men (GBSMM). This study contextualizes the perceptions, susceptibility, and lived experiences of the mpox outbreak among GBSMM in the U.S. using an intersectional framework. METHODS: Between September 2022 to February 2023, we conducted 33 semi-structured qualitative interviews with purposively sampled GBSMM in the Northeast and the South region of the United States on various aspects related to their experience during the mpox outbreak. RESULTS: We identified four themes: (1) understanding and conceptualizations of mpox, (2) mpox vaccine availability and accessibility, (3) mpox vaccine hesitancy and mistrust, and (4) call to action and recommendations. GBSMM collectively discussed the elevated mpox stigmatization and homophobic discourse from mainstream social media and news outlets. GBSMM also discussed the lack of availability of mpox vaccines, unclear procedures to receive the vaccine, and continued mistrust in government, non-government, and other institutions of health that were complicit in anti-LGBTQ + narratives related to mpox. However, they expressed that these challenges may be addressed through more LGTBQ + representation and leveraging ways to empower these communities. CONCLUSION: GBSMM have mpox experiences that are distinct and multifaceted. Effectively addressing mpox and mitigating public health emergencies for GBSMM requires prioritizing destigmatizing communication channels and vaccine distribution strategies by centering their stories and lived experiences to advance health equity.

#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.

Behind the Hashtag: Online Disclosure of Mental Illness and Community Response on Tumblr.

The present study examined personal disclosures about mental illness and the responses of online community members on the social media platform, Tumblr. We sampled public blog posts of 14,626 Tumblr users disclosing ten different mental health diagnoses using hashtags (e.g., #depression, #anxiety, and #anorexia). We examined the content of users' disclosures, predictors of disclosure frequency, and predictors of online community response. The content of most disclosures was related to users' emotions and cognitions about their mental health and their feelings of interpersonal loss and change over time. Content varied with users' disclosure frequency and with self-identified mental health diagnoses. Predictors of disclosure frequency included the "self effects" of writing about oneself or one's opinions, such as self-concept formation, and "reception effects" of receiving responses to one's writing. User disclosures generally increased with frequency of community response (reception effects), and the degree of this effect differed depending on the disclosed diagnosis (self effects). The responses of online community members also varied significantly across disclosed diagnoses. The implications of our findings for community research and action are discussed.