A Third of LGBT Youth Suffer Mental Disorders
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, Brian Mustanski, assistant professor of psychiatry talks about the prevalence of mental health disorders in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth.
Here’s professor Mustanski:
[Mustanski] The project that we just had the results come out from in the American Journal of Public Health focused on the mental health of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth – which, for short, we refer to as LGBT youth.
The study that we did was looking at the mental health of this population. Some previous research had suggested that LGBT youth were more likely to make suicide attempts and suggested that they may have higher levels of mental health problems. But there hadn’t been a study that had actually done what’s considered the gold stand in research, to do structured psychiatric interviews with the youth. And that was our real question, was trying to understand how many of these young people experience mental health problems and had made suicide attempts during their life.
So we recruited a sample of 250, 16- to 20-year-old, LGBT youth in Chicago. And when they came in for their interviews we administered a psychiatric interview to them asking about things like depression, making a suicide attempt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and we were interested in seeing whether they were more likely than other groups to experience some of these kinds of mental health problems.
Some previous work had hypothesized that these youth may be more likely to experience some of these mental health problems because of some of the minority stressors that LGBT people experience. LGBT people may be more likely to experience victimization, discrimination and stigma and we know that those kinds of experiences can be really difficult and can lead to mental health problems.
We were also interested in looking at differences between different sub-groups of LGBT youth, so do bisexual youth, do they tend to have more mental health problems than gay and lesbian youth? Do racial minority youth, black and Latino youth, tend to experience more mental health problems than white youth? And you might hypothesize that because when you’re a member of multiple minority groups you may experience more stigma and discrimination.
So what we found when we did these interviews is that about 70 percent of the LGBT youth that we interviewed didn’t meet criteria for any of the mental disorders. And I think that’s one of the most important findings that we had is that most of these youth are doing very well. Most of them are not experiencing mental health problems. But about a third of them did meet criteria for one of the mental health disorders. Nearly 10 percent of them met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. And about 15 percent met criteria for major depression. About a third of them had made a suicide attempt at some point in their life, and about 6 percent of them made a suicide attempt in the last year.
And when we present this information people immediately tend to ask us, ‘well is this higher than other kids? Are these youth more likely to have mental disorders relative to other kids?’ And the answer to that is that it really depends. It really depends on who you’re comparing them to.
If you’re comparing them to national studies, studies that look at youth from across the country, kids living in urban areas, in rural areas, kids of all different ethnicities but representative of the U.S. population, it looks like these young people do have higher levels of some of these mental health problems. But, again, we have to make those comparisons very cautiously because each study has its own methodology, has its own way of recruiting people, and its own way of assessing these things and some of those differences in the research design can also explain the differences.
However, if you compare the sample to other samples of urban, predominantly racial and ethnic minority youth – for example, there was a big study done on mental health of young people living in South Florida, the rates of mental health problems in that sample were very comparable to the urban youth that we studied in this particular project. So it appears that it’s very critical to consider who you’re making the comparison between. Are you comparing urban youth to urban youth, or urban youth to national samples of youth? And when we make these comparisons to other studies of urban, racial minority youth it looks like there’s relatively few differences between the samples.
We were also somewhat interested to find that the bisexual youth in this study were less likely to have any of the mental disorders that we studied, compared to the lesbian and gay youth. And previous research had suggested that bisexual youth are more likely to have mental disorders than the other groups. Our finding was the opposite of this. And there’s a couple reasons that that could be the case, why our study would produce different results. One is that ours was the first study to actually do a psychiatric interview with these young people, so it’s possible that some of the questionnaire-type survey measures that had been used in the past tend to over-estimate mental disorders in certain groups. And so, you may get a different pattern depending on how you measure these things. It’s also possible that because society is changing so quickly in terms of how it treats LGBT young people, it’s possible that as society is changing that the patterns of mental health differences amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are changing as well. And so it’s possible that in more recent studies we won’t find these differences.
[Writer] Brian Mustanski is assistant professor of psychiatry and director of UIC’s IMPACT Program.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases” and look for the release dated November 30, 2010.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
