RESUMEN

Anxiety is a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary society. With increased internet use in recent years, more people in the general population are seeking and providing help and participating in community online. The goal of our study was to evaluate the content of internet narratives among those who post about anxiety and determine what stakeholder groups are saying online. We used the bifurcated method; it is a multi-method (qualitative) approach with inductive, thematic analyses, and with quantification of content-related words via a computer program that crawls websites and counts the occurrences of specified terms (for cross-checking purposes). Themes of posts and webpages about anxiety were: using/reporting treatment strategies (83.3% saturation), providing help (77.8% saturation), telling personal stories (72.2% saturation), seeking help (61.1% saturation), and illustrating interpersonal impact (50% saturation). We argue that anxiety stakeholders may take part in health co-inquiry online (i.e., cooperating with others) in many of the same ways that they might collaborate in person. We recommend that clinicians query their clients about use of the internet in ways related to their anxiety (e.g., seeking information/treatment strategies, offering help to others, telling their personal stories, etc.) so that they might help them process what they experience online.

In the COVID-19 era, anxiety has increased in the general population (Shigemura, Ursano, Morganstein, Kurosawa, & Benedek, 2020; Wang et al., 2020).Daily use of the internet in the general population is extensive (Gangamma et al., 2022).Clients in therapy may use the internet in ways that interact with their clinical conditions, e.g., finding information, seeking support, providing others with information, searching/accessing services/treatment.It is vital for therapists to inquire in ways that improve their understanding of their clients' uses of the internet.