Sentiment Analysis on Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Tweets Before and During COVID-19 Pandemic

This research aims to explore sentiment patterns on substance use disorder (SUD) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly challenged global healthcare systems and resulted in 2.78 million deaths based on CDC news as of March 2021. Because of social isolation, economic hardships, and fear caused by the lockdown orders, substance use has been strikingly increased including the youth. This is alarming because SUD causes long-lasting and permanent damages to human body and brains as significant health consequences. In this project, we extracted ten-month Tweet samples from May 2019 to December 2020 on Twitter related to SUD mentioning substance and consequences before and during the COVID-19, and then identified the sentiment patterns of the tweets mentioning the SUD. We found that the sentiment trends remained negative except in March and April of 2020, when the social restrictions were imposed, much more positive sentiment appeared in SUD-related tweets.