Increased Internet Searches for Insomnia as an Indicator of Global Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multinational Longitudinal Study

BACKGROUND: Real-time global mental health surveillance is urgently needed for tracking the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to use Google Trends data to investigate the impact of the pandemic on global mental health by analyzing three keywords indicative of mental distress: “insomnia,” “depression,” and “suicide.” METHODS: We examined increases in search queries for 19 countries. Significant increases were defined as the actual daily search value (from March 20 to April 19, 2020) being higher than the 95% CIs of the forecast from the 3-month baseline via ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) modeling. We examined the correlation between increases in COVID-19–related deaths and the number of days with significant increases in search volumes for insomnia, depression, and suicide across multiple nations. RESULTS: The countries with the greatest increases in searches for insomnia were Iran, Spain, the United States, and Italy; these countries exhibited a significant increase in insomnia searches on more than 10 of the 31 days observed. The number of COVID-19–related deaths was positively correlated to the number of days with an increase in searches for insomnia in the 19 countries (ρ=0.64, P=.003). By contrast, there was no significant correlation between the number of deaths and increases in searches for depression (ρ=–0.12, P=.63) or suicide (ρ=–0.07, P=.79). CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis suggests that insomnia could be a part of routine mental health screening during the COVID-19 pandemic.