Societal attitudes towards ketamine: a twitter analysis comparing weekday and weekend content

Background: Treatment resistant depression (TRD) is defined as no improvement in symptoms after trials of two or more anti-depressants. Ketamine, a novel treatment for TRD, has faced controversy, despite its proven efficacy. Twitter is a social media site where people commonly share their opinions and experiences. This study aimed to use Twitter to identify public opinions on the use of ketamine and compare if tweets posted midweek differ from the weekend.

Method: International tweets containing the keywords ‘ketamine’, ‘esketamine’ and/or ‘Spravato’ were collected on Thursday 3/11/2022 and Sunday 6/11/2022. Using NVivo an inductive content analysis was carried out, where tweets were manually coded based on content.

Results: On Thursday, of 481 tweets collected, 39.3% related to the medical use of ketamine, whereas 22.4% related to recreational use. Positive personal experiences with medical ketamine were expressed (14.1%). On Sunday, of 284 tweets collected, tweets relating to medical use were similarly more common (19.4%) than recreational use (14.7%). Additionally, on Sunday, the most common theme was jokes relating to ketamine (42.3%).

Conclusion: The data suggests that opinions on the use of medicinal ketamine are varied, and it is evident that different content is expressed on Twitter on different days of the week. Anecdotes posted from individuals prescribed ketamine are promising and reflect the efficacy proven in clinical trials. Tweets depicting recreational use, or jokes, may further increase the stigma surrounding ketamine use in TRD. Scepticism over novel treatments is not uncommon, and opinions may change as ketamine becomes more established in TRD.