AWARE is looking back on ICA26 in Cape Town

ICA 2026 in Cape Town marked a project milestone, presenting results at one of the most, if not the most, recognized international conferences in our field. Across four contributions, a Doctoral Consortium, two panels, and a Research Escalator session, we shared early findings on how adolescents encounter and make sense of mental illness content on social media. Between sessions, the receptions and hallway conversations did just as much, sparking new contacts and ideas we are carrying into the next project phase.

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"Digital Diagnoses": Mental Health Portrayals on Social Media and Implications For Adolescents' Self-Perceptions"

(Doctoral Consortium)

"Depressed or Just Monday? A Content Analysis of Concept Creep in Public TikTok Posts about Mental Health"

Alina Danilkow, Katharina Rupp, Sophie Mayen, Ruth Wendt, Anne-Linda Camerini, Kathrin Karsay

After the panel presentation, the discussion focused on how research on mental health communication has predominantly focused on inaccurate information, while largely overlooking overgeneralized information that may be factually grounded but still distorts broader understandings of mental health concepts. This highlights the importance of expanding future research beyond misinformation to examine how seemingly accurate yet overgeneralized portrayals shape users’ perceptions and understandings of mental health on social media.

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"Self-Diagnosis of Mental Illness in Adolescence: A Cross-Sectional Study on Predictors and Protective Factors in the Context of Algorithmically Curated Social Media Content"

Hannah J. Bauer, Sophie Mayen, Kathrin Karsay, Anne-Linda Camerini, Ruth Wendt

The Research Escalator Session of ICA’s CAM (Children, Adolescents and Media) Division provides early career scholars with the opportunity to discuss a current manuscript with a senior mentor. Hannah received targeted feedback on the study’s theoretical foundation and her analytical plan. More generally, her mentor reaffirmed her in the need to conduct longitudinal studies assessing how mental illness content may shape processes of self-diagnosis in adolescence. Thus, the session left her with helpful guidance and confidence to advance her study.

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"This didn't exist back then": A Focus Group Study on Adolescents' Perceptions of Mental Illness in the Context of Family, Peers, School, and Social Media

Dora Weubel, Hannah J. Bauer, Kathrin Karsay, Ruth Wendt, Anne-Linda Camerini

During the Q&A session the audience discussed whether the romanticization of mental illness on social media might actually have a positive side, as personal stories and visual content effectively bring widespread attention and visibility to the topic. However, attendees also raised critical concerns about the downsides of this phenomenon, noting that such content can easily lead to misinformation and inaccurate self-diagnosis among adolescents. 

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Beyond the conference: ICA Hackathon

Sophie Mayen & Dora Weubel

Before the main conference, Dora and Sophie joined the two-day ICA Pre-conference Hackathon at Stellenbosch University (SU School for Data Science and Computational Thinking), organized by ICA’s Computational Methods Division and the Communication Science and Biology Interest Group. The format is collaborative; teams form on site, share skills, and build something concrete over two days.

Our project tackled a recurring problem in longitudinal school-based research: youth panel studies link waves through self-generated ID codes, but error rates within the code components often break matching across study waves. We used real data and simulations to build an automated pipeline that recovers degraded codes through tiered fuzzy matching. It feeds into AWARE’s own wave linkage and is built to help future studies too.