Picturing Mental Health on Instagram: Insights from a Quantitative Study Using Different Content Formats

Background: COVID-19 has changed individual lives to the core. Through national curfews and social distancing, individuals’ social lives changed and led to increased levels of stress and mental health problems. As another consequence, communication, especially among young people, has shifted to social networking sites, where particularly young adults sought help for their mental health problems. In recent years, Instagram has received recognition for its health-enhancing potentials. On this social networking site, more than 1 billion users worldwide post 500 million stories and images per day. Methods: During COVID-19, increasing mental health incidences were reported throughout the world, and have led mental health influencers to gain in relevance. The proposed study is based on a quantitative survey. In order to test how different content formats utilized by mental health influencers —motivational quotes, comics, or influencer posts—are evaluated by Instagram users, a cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted in April 2021. Data collection was based on convenience sampling. In total, 532 Austrian respondents between 16 and 34 years of age participated in the survey. Results: Overall, the content that received the most favorable evaluations were both the motivational quote (M = 4.23) and the influencer post (M = 4.12), while the comics scored lower in terms of evaluations (M = 3.72). Conclusions: Respondents’ preference of content suggests that individuals seek out content that boosts their esteem or content with a “human touch”. Explanations as to why the selected content formats were preferred over the other formats are offered alongside a future research outlook.