Analyzing blackout drinking culture on Twitter during lockdown (podcast)

Humans are social creatures, and self-isolation and living in quarantine can have a very negative impact on mental health. Therefore, many have turned to substances such as cannabis or alcohol to cope.

To put it lightly, a Tweet by comedy writer Emily Murnane summed this up at the start of the lockdown, stating, “Days are now divided by coffee hours and alcohol hours.”

But jokes aside, we could see serious implications in society for our immediate and long-term health, both physically and mentally as a result of this new COVID-19 drinking culture.

To better understand and observe this change in drinking culture, Rose Marie Ward, psychology professor at Miami University, set out to analyze the prevalence of publicly available tweets in the USA referencing alcohol‐induced blackouts prior to and during the COVID‐19 outbreak.

Listen to this podcast on Spotify, Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, Listen Notes, PodBean, and Radio Public.

We invited Ward on the show to discuss how this study was conducted, what the research indicated, and the wider applications of this study.

In this episode, you will learn how the lockdown could form alcoholic tendencies, which parts of the US drink the most, and the impact of alcohol use among healthcare works during previous SARS outbreaks.