INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS

OF MENTAL STRESS IN
RAJASTHAN DURING COVID’19
PANDEMIC

ABSTRACT
The Corona virus pandemic has come down heavy on everyone. It
has turned the whole world upside down. Restlessness is fueling
among everyone in the entire world. It's an unprecedented crisis i.e.
giving rise to various mental health issues among individuals. Mental
health issues such as depression, anxiety, fear, sadness, worry,
disgust are increasing in people over a period of time. Mental stress
can cause various other behavioural, physical, emotional and
psychological problems to a person. The nationwide lockdown for
forestalling covid’19 has given rise to a lot of uncertainty and
undoubtedly contributed to widespread emotional distress and
increased risk for psychiatric illness. This paper analyzes mental
stress due to covid’19 pandemic through user generated content on
twitter over a state of Rajasthan, India. Special lexicology is used for
classifying the data into depressing and non depressing content. The
lexica relating to depression was used. The depressing content was
then analyzed for each divisions of Rajasthan.The results are
represented using visualizations and graphs. The visualization were
created using Tableau a very powerful BI tool.This analysis can help
government agencies to take necessary action to combat the
undesirable issue of mental stress. This analysis can help National
Mental health program (NMHP) which was launched in 1982 by
government of India to prevent and treat neurological disorders and
their associated disabilities. This analysis can encourage NMHP to
avail health care facilities and counseling sessions to more vulnerable
divisions of Rajasthan which are interpreted in the study. It can help
NMHP for developing adequate infrastructure, mental health welfare
committees for the most student centered cities of Rajasthan. It can
help Medical agencies to increase the allotment of doctors and other
profession dealing with psychiatry in the regions which require more
attention. The study will help in identify vulnerable regions of
Rajasthan affected by mental health problems and taking proper
preventive measures.
 INDEX
I. INTRODUCTION

II. DETAILS OF DATA

1. STUDY LOCATION
2. DATA COLLECTION
3. DATA MODEL

III. SENTIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF DEPRESSING TWEETS

IV. ANALYSIS OF DEPRESSING TWEETS

1. DEPRESSING AND NON DEPRESSING TWEET
2. DEPRESSING TWEETS OVER A PERIOD OF 3.5 MONTHS
AND COVID’19 CASES IN RAJASTHAN
3. STRESS LEVEL V/S CURED COVID’19 CASES
4. MENTAL STRESS DYNAMICS IN DIVISIONS OF
RAJASTHAN
5. STRESS LEVEL ANALYSIS FOR EACH DIVISION WITH
RECOVERY RATE

V. STRESS DYNAMICS IN STUDENTS DUE TO COVID’19 AND

LOCKDOWN
1. STUDENTS TWEET AND LOCKDOWN TIMELINE
2. SENTIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS TWEETS
3. ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS EMOTION WITH RESPECT TO
DIVISIONS OF RAJASTHAN.

VI. CONCLUSION

I. INTRODUCTION
The novel corona virus outbreak has brought the world to stand
still. The virus has clearly stopped our lives in motion. People are
in high risk as this virus spreads rapidly in close proximity with
other people and through community transmission [2]. The whole
world is trying to contain the virus by different methods and some
of them have unable to flatten the curve and India being one of
them. The infection is spreading exponentially in India with an
approximate 30,000 cases per day and countries overall mark
has reached to 1.7 million cases [1]. Rajasthan, the state in
western India have been moderately affected by corona virus with
overall tally till 2nd August is 42,646[1]. Several steps have been
taken by Indian government to contain the virus such as
nationwide lockdown, cancellation of flights and trains, delay in
examination and many more which have caused sadness to
despair among people living here. Some sections of Indian
society are hardly hit by the steps of the government especially
the migrant workers, students. Millions of students were stranded
in different cities and unable to reach their homes which have
caused immense mental stress to them and their parents. This
outbreak and related events have caused immense distress
among individuals and increase mental health issues such as
depression, stress, worry, fear, disgust, sadness etc[3].The
mental health issues can occur to any person affected or un-
affected from corona virus. Mental stress can lead to depression
and many other mental health issues [4]. It can lead to
behavioural and psychological issues among people. A person
faces several complications due to mental stress and increase in
level of stress can lead to depression. Depression is one of the
most common diseases among people worldwide. People with
depression may experience symptoms amounting to their inability
to focus on anything, they constantly go through the feeling of
guilt and irritation, they suffer from low self-worth, and experience
sleep problems. Depression can, therefore, cause serious
consequences, at both personal and social costs [6].Suicidal
cases were reported in India[5] and parts of world such as in Italy
where two infected Italian nurses committed suicide in a period of
a few days probably due to fear of spreading COVID-19 to
patients.
Due to nationwide lockdown, work from home policy, shutdown of
schools and colleges have created a surge on social media.
People are using social media for expressing their thoughts,
emotions, viewpoints to the world and twitter is one of the
prominent used social networking sites. It was 40% of more
consumers have spent longer than usual time in social media and
messaging app [7].People express their views in the form of
tweets. Every tweet represents a user state of mind and their
viewpoint at that time. The proper analysis of these tweets can be
used to find out the users state of being and its aggregation can
lead to monitor health and provide solutions for the same [8].
It was found that there are a diverse set of quantifiable signals
relevant to mental health observable in Twitter [9], due to which
twitter is widely used site for analyzing depression around the
world [10].Various research works are done to analyze
depression using tweets done by users using machine learning
algorithms [11][12][13].One of the study[14] uses sentimental
analysis to calculate the negativity of depressing tweets and it
was found that the negativity of sentiments have increased over
period of time while the positive scores depressed.
This paper aims to examine mental stress of the people of the
state of Rajasthan, India. Rajasthan have a population of about
76.1million [15].The data has been categorized into depressing
and non-depressing tweets from all the tweets that have been
extracted for the period of 3.5 month after the imposition of
nationwide lockdown. The work aims at detecting mental stress
dynamics that can help governments and related agencies to take
appropriate steps. The analysis can help NIMS to implement
preventive measures in regional divisions of Rajasthan over time
and also help them in estimating level of severity in each division.
It will help them to appoint psychiatrist, naturopaths, mental
health counselor across state of Rajasthan.
The primary purpose of the study is to find out the extent of
number of people that are tweeting about mental stress and
depression over a state of Rajasthan instead of whole country.
The relationship between depressing tweets and covid’19 cases
was examined over a period of nationwide lockdown. Sentiment
analysis was performed to study the negativity of tweets and
average negativity over regions of Rajasthan was plotted. The
stress dynamics among the students stranded in Rajasthan was
examined. The study gives the relation between mental stresses
of people over time period of implementation of lockdown to 15
July.The paper is organized as follows: We reviewed the related
work related to depression analysis in section II and presented
the details of data in section III. We then performed the
sentimental analysis of depressing tweets to estimate the severity
range of tweets in section IV. After that we used our categorized
data to examine relationship between covid’19 cases and
recovery rate for Rajasthan and its divisions separately in section
V. In section VI dynamics between student’s mental stress and
measures due to lockdown is studied along with sentimental
analysis of their tweets. Finally, the study is concluded in section
VII.

II.RELATED WORK
 III. DETAILS OF DATA

1. STUDY LOCATION:
The study is conducted for the state of Rajasthan, India having a
population of about 8.1 millions and an area of 342,239 square
kilometers or 10.4% of the total geographical area of India. The
state of Rajasthan is divided into 7 divisions, each division
including within them the group of districts. The data is collected
for each of this division. The seven divisions are Ajmer,
Bharatpur, Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota and Udaipur division.

2. DATA COLLECTION:
To analyze the mental stress dynamics we collected tweets from
the different twitter users residing in these divisions. The tweets
collected were from 25 March 2020 to 15 July 2020 after the
announcement of nationwide lockdown. In this data were
collected for each division separately and for divisions of larger
area the data is collected by dividing it into sub-division such as
for Jodhpur division. The tweets were collected using Twitter’s
Stream API, a verified application associated with an open
stream. All the tweets were collected for a given time period. In
summary 221809 tweets were collected with an average of
31,687 tweets from each division. Along with the tweets from
twitter datasheet having details of covid cases per day for
Rajasthan state was also extracted. The data sheet so extracted
had details of no of confirmed cases, dismissed cases, recovery
rate per day for a period of 4 months. This data sheet was
downloaded from kaggle.com.
3. DATA MODEL:
The data collected for a given time span was consolidated using
sheet-go add on of Google sheets. The tweets were then filtered
using language classification and all the tweets that were tweeted
in English language was classified. The classified English tweets
comprised about 54576 tweets. The above counted tweets were
used for further analysis. Any data obtained from any social
networking contains lots of additional details which may be of little
use. Therefore data extracted from any media needs to be
cleaned. For cleaning the data and to tokenize only relevant parts
of the tweet NLTK (natural language processing toolkit) library
was used. Natural language processing toolkit is widely used
because of its high pre-processing capabilities and data
normalization. It is one of the most powerful libraries available in
python for text-processing and is useful for performing some of
machine learning techniques like sentimental analysis.
The processed tweets were then categorized into depressing and
non-depressing tweets. The tweets were categorized into
depressing and non-depressing tweets using various lexicons that
is related to mental stress and depression such as anxiety,
depression, disgust, fear, worry, sadness, distress etc were used.
The tweets were identified if it contains any of lexicons relating to
depression. This is done using string container function in python
panda’s library. The tweets relating to mental stress are stored in
a different data frame and non-depressing tweets in another data
frame. Most of the analysis is performed using a data frame
containing depressed tweets.
III. SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF TWEETS
TO ESTIMATE THE SEVERITY OF
MENTAL STRESS.

Sentiment analysis is a set of Natural Language Processing

(NLP) techniques that extract opinions in natural language text.
Simply put, the objective of sentiment analysis is to categorize the
sentiment of a text by sorting it into positive, neutral, and
negative. Sentiment analysis provides a polarity and subjectivity
value to individual sentences after analyzing it. Polarity in
sentiment analysis refers to identifying sentiment orientation
(positive, neutral, and negative) in written or spoken language.
The polarity of the sentences ranges from [-1, 1], where -1 refers
to most negative sentences and +1 refers to most positive
sentences.
We have used sentimental analysis to find out the extent of
negativity in individual tweets; the more negative the polarity of
tweet the more severe the tweet is. Sentimental analysis is
performed using a text blob package available in python. The text
blob package of python is a convenient way of doing lots of
language processing tasks.
The sentimental analysis for depressing tweets is plotted. The
polarity range for each of the sentiment is plotted. The major
polarity ranges from -0.4 to 0.4.The average polarity for each
division is used for plotting relative severity of each division in
section III.4.
IV. ANALYSIS OF DEPRESSING
TWEETS

1. DEPRESSING AND NON-DEPRESSING TWEETS:

Of the analyzed 54k tweets about 1358 tweets were found out to
contain keywords related to depression and mental stress , which
accounts for 2.49% of the total tweets.

The relative use of some frequently used depression and mental

stress terms are shown using a bar graph.It was concluded that
the word related to sadness such as sad,saddening has occurred
maximum number of times with dismal being the least.
2. DEPRESSING TWEETS OVER A PERIOD OF 3.5
MONTHS AND COVID’19 CASES IN RAJASTHAN

The fig. Below presents overall mental stress dynamics in

Rajasthan with the confirmed cases of covid-19 together during
study period from 1st April 2020 to 7 June 2020.The relaxation in
lockdown in the country was given on 31st may 2020 , due to
which covid’19 cases rose more exponentially in India. The
depression dynamics was analyzed for 1 week after lockdown
and was found that the no. of depressing tweets was at its peak
on 7 June 2020, one week after the relaxation in lockdown.

We also concluded that anxiety and stress level was considerably

high when the cases were low due to fear and panic. However,
with time people get used to the situation and the stress level was
moderate to low even with the increase in covid’19 cases.

The graph below gives the relation between covid’19 cases and
depression level. It was found that after achieving its peak in 7
June 2020(one week after the relaxation in lockdown) starts to
decrease even with the increase in covid’19 cases. It can be said
that now people were stable and adjusted to the situation.

3. STRESS LEVEL V/S CURED COVID’19 CASES

The relationship between depressing tweets and %age increase
in recovered cases was plotted. Percentage recovery was
modeled using no of cured patients and no. of confirmed cases
for a period of 3.5 months from the data extracted from
kaggle.com. It was concluded that the no. of depressing tweets
starts to decrease with increase in % recovery rate. It can be
seen that the area between the depressing tweets start to
increase with %age increase in recovery rate.

4. MENTAL STRESS DYNAMICS IN DIVISIONS OF

RAJASTHAN
The mental stress dynamics for different divisions of Rajasthan is
plotted. The average severity for each division is indicated by
intensity of colour.The size of the circle represents the amount of
depressing tweets obtained in any division and colour gives the
average severity in each of the divisions.

In the interpretation above the average polarity of tweets from

Udaipur finds to be most negative as compared to other divisions.
However, the amount of depressing tweets obtained is moderate.
In Jaisalmer division the amount of cases are maximum however
the severity level is moderate. For Bikaner division both
conditions are stable that is polarity tends to be more positive and
an amount of depressing tweets so obtained is also less.

5. STRESS LEVEL ANALYSIS FOR EACH DIVISION

WITH RECOVERY RATE
The total amount of depressing content was plotted with the
recovery rate of each division. The figure below gives the
interpretation for the same. It is clear from the figure that the
difference between depressing tweets and % recovery rate keeps
on increasing with decreasing recovery rate. Recovery rate is the
amount of patients cured from total confirmed cases. Lesser the
recovery rate more is the depressing content.As,for Udaipur the
recovery rate is least and the depressing tweet is second highest
in number.For,Ajmer it can be seen that more is the recovery rate
and lesser is the depressing tweets contents.

V. STRESS DYNAMICS IN STUDENTS

DUE TO COVID’19 AND LOCKDOWN.
For the safety of students and to prevent them from acquiring
covid’19 infection schools, colleges and universities are shut
down since March. The closing of schools and universities have
created an anxious situation among them. They are worried about
their future and uncertainty has covered them. The lockdown
obstructed the study routines and therefore some institutes
decided to conduct online cases which had affected student’s life
and their thought towards studies. Not only students their families
are also concerned about the stress level in students.
Apart from it many of the students live in hostel of their colleges
and universities different from their hometown. Many of the
students stay in PG and hostels for preparing for various
competition examinations like JEE, NEET, GATE, UPSC and
many more. Every year lakhs of students go to Kota, Rajasthan to
prepare for competitive exams.Students were not able to get back
to their to home due to sudden announcement of lockdown and
shutdown of rail and air movement. This created the situation of
panic among them and their parents. Many students confessed
that were feeling lonely, stressed and anxious due to no
coaching, uncertain exam dates, restricted interaction with other
students and coaching institutes, and limited availability of food.
Most of the students were facing financial constraints as they did
not account for the extra time they will have to spend in kota.

The depressing tweets that were categorized were analyzed to

get the amount of depressing tweets from students. The tweets
were categorized using lexicons such as students, exam and
UGC.We found that the depressing tweets accounts about 6.64%
of total tweets. It is represented from doughnut chart below.
The word cloud was plotted to get the frequency of the words
used by student to convey their messages to the government and
institute. Around 1500 tweets was annotated manually to
eliminate stress tweets other than covid’19.The word cloud was
plotted using the filtered tweets.

It can be seen from the above word cloud that many of the
students have appealed for cancelling exams and to promote
them.Also,they have asked to send them home as they all were
stranded in kota.Sad can be seen as the most frequently used
word.

1. STUDENTS TWEET AND LOCKDOWN TIMELINE

The annotated tweets of students were used to study their

concern in the lockdown period. The tweets count of student that
was extracted for the period of 1 April 2020 to 15 April was plotted
against the lockdown timeline. The first lockdown 1.0 was
announced in India from 25th march to 14th april.This is the
duration when many people were away from their home and
flights and trains were cancelled and unable to reach their home.
After 15th April the lockdown was further extended in various
phases.The second lockdown 2.0 was started from 14th may to 3
May.Lockdown 3.0 extended from 4th may to 31st may. After 31st
May much relaxation was given to the people.
We can see that the amount of tweets were at its peak on 14th
April 2020. 14/04/2020 was the last date of the first lockdown
which was announced without prior information. Many students
jumped to twitter to express their problems and concern during
that time. It can also been seen that the tweets count began to
decrease after that day ,as the government of India took several
steps to sent back the stranded students to their home. It can be
seen that the level of counts again start to increase second time
around June 20.This is the time when students expressed their
concern regarding their exams and study issues they are facing.
2. SENTIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS TWEETS

The sentimental analysis was performed in the tweets tweeted by

students. The ratio of tweets in positive, negative and neutral
categories is interpreted. Let us examine some tweets tweeted by
students.

TWEET POLARITY SENTIMENT

Stressed, depressed teens, tensions of upcoming -.21467 NEGATIVE
exams, guilt of not studying, 2000 kms away from
home, drastically decreased quality of food!
All the other students are gone, feeling scared &
alone, lonely... Not exaggerating but pls helps us.

No one is listening to our voices. #KotaStudents 0.0 NEUTRAL

#SendUsBackHome #Kota we all want to go back
home.
 GeneralPromotionToMPStudents 0.75 POSITIVE
Operation .NoExamsInCovid successful

The first tweet is highly a negative tweet because it contains various

terms like stressed, depressed etc and have a negative polarity of
-.21467.The second statement is a neutral statement because it
contains no such words. The third statement is a positive statement
because it contains word success.
The other graph below depicts the polarity range of tweets of
students in a period. We can see from the graph that most of the
tweets of students lie from range moderate negativity to moderate
positivity.
3. ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS EMOTION WITH
RESPECT TO DIVISIONS OF RAJASTHAN.

The above figure shows students tweet over each division. The
no of tweets are indicated using size of the circle and the intensity
of colour represents average polarity in each division. It can be
seen from the figure that maximum numbers of tweets were from
Kota and least number of tweets were from bikaner.However, the
more negative tweets were from Ajmer and most of the positive
tweets are from jaisalmer.
VI.CONCLUSION
COVID’19 has affected almost all sections of society. It has
caused major instability to an individual and caused mental stress
in them. Due to lockdown and other measures people are
conveying their emotions using social media.
The report deals with the impact of covid’19 and related events
which have severely affected the mental health of people. The
data related to covid cases collected from kaggle.com and data
extracted from twitter is used to produce an analogy between
covid’19 and public fear and emotions. We have represented our
analysis using the visualizations created using tableau and
python. We started the analysis after introducing the topic and
further discussion on them. The relation between depressing
tweets and covid’19 cases are used to estimate the level of
depression among individual and especially among students. The
sentimental analysis was performed using text blob package to
get the severity of tweets and average severity is used to define
severity level in each division.
Our analysis can be successfully used for evaluating mental
stress among the divisions of Rajasthan, India. It can be seen that
about 2.4% of the people tweeted about mental stress, anxiety
and depression. Majority of them are sad about the events. It can
be seen that the depressing tweets were at its peak as the corona
cases were increasing rapidly after the relaxation of lockdown in
month of june.It can also be observed that depression was
decreasing with percentage increase in recovery rate. It can also
be observed that the depressing tweets were more for the region
was percentage recovery is comparatively less in percentage.
It is evident from our analysis that 6.62% of depressing tweets
were from students. It can also be seen that the tweets of
students were maximum at the end of first lockdown. Also, the
majority of tweets of students from Kota. Students have majorly
showed their concern towards uncertainty of their exam and they
being stranded away from their hometown.
This analysis gives the depression and other stress level along
the state of Rajasthan. The inferences drawn can be used by
various related institutes, government departments to do the
related work and will help to implement various measures to
reduce the stress level among people.

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