  The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of society, not only bringing
health hazards, but also posing challenges to public order, governments and
mental health. Moreover, it is the first one in history in which people from
around the world uses social media to massively express their thoughts and
concerns. This study aims at examining the stages of crisis response and
recovery as a sociological problem by operationalizing a well-known model of
crisis stages in terms of a psycho-linguistic analysis. Based on a large
collection of Twitter data spanning from March to August 2020 in Argentina, we
present a thematic analysis on the differences in language used in social media
posts, and look at indicators that reveal the different stages of a crisis and
the country response thereof. The analysis was combined with a study of the
temporal prevalence of mental health conversations across the time span. Beyond
the Argentinian case-study, the proposed approach and analyses can be applied
to any public large-scale data. This approach can provide insights for the
design of public health politics oriented to monitor and eventually intervene
during the different stages of a crisis, and thus improve the adverse mental
health effects on the population.
