Scouring for good news these days can feel like a fruitless task, but there are still a few glimmers of hope out there for anyone willing to do a little digging.
Case in point: New research out of John Hopkins University, Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital suggest the legalization of gay marriage may be at the root of a sudden drop in suicide attempts among LGBTQ teens, currently at an all-time low in the U.S.
Related: Straight guys confess their same-sex sexual encounters in candid new study
Dazed and Confused reports:
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The study, carried out across 17 years over 47 U.S states, saw the biggest drop among gay, lesbian and bisexual young people, with 14 percent less suicide attempts. It translates to roughly 134,000 fewer teens.
Julia Raifman, who co-authored the research, has plenty to say about her findings:
“I would hope that policymakers and the public would consider the potential health implications of laws and policies affecting LGBT rights.
This study was really motivated by evidence that there are large disparities across domains of health that affect LGBT adolescents. I was interested in whether larger structural issues were potentially leading to those disparities.”
In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. 36 other states followed suit before it ultimately became federal law in 2015.
The research heavily replied upon data collected for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System every two years; date which included over 760,000 students between 1999 and 2015.
Related: Study: Beautiful Women Are Much More Likely To Choose Gay Friends
Researchers compared suicide rates between states that had legalized same-sex marriage and those that hadn’t by January 2015. They found a 0.6 drop in the states that had legalized it, which has interesting implications.
“We found that the effects of legalization persisted two years after legalization, suggesting that social and political backlash does not have the effect of worsening mental health outcomes in this window,” Raifman writes.
“Our results build on prior research indicating that state same-sex marriage bans were associated with increased rates of psychiatric disorders and that health expenditures decreased following implementation of a same-sex marriage policy in Massachusetts.”
Of course, the potential correlation still needs to be examined further.
“There are a number of potential mechanisms,” Raifman says.
Those include whether the policies themselves reduce perceived stigma among adolescents – and that may drive reductions in suicide attempts – but it is also possible that same-sex marriage policies drive social change among parents, teachers and peers of sexual minority adolescents. It is also possible that the campaigns around same-sex marriage policies are responsible for changing the experiences of LGB adolescents.
Learn more about the study here.
Bob LaBlah
Why is the story about Yiannopolous and his endorsement of pedophilia being ignored?
Kangol
It’s very, very strange. Milo Y’s giving a live press conference right now, as his career disintegrates into ashes. Yet Queerty bizarrely has refused to write about it. WTF?
Back to the young people who’ve felt empowered by same-sex marriage, it’s wonderful news. An thank you President Barack Obama, thank you Jim Obergefell, and thank you everyone who made this major push in gay/LGBTQ/same-sex equality possible!
HighCheekBones
Probably because he never actually did and it was a smear campaign against him that took his words out of context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv0JlJgAYNQ
It’s really bizarre how we (gay men) are appalled by the disgusting ways many still believe we are pedos only for some use that stereotype as a way to attack an ideological opponent despite it being false.
dwes09
“Probably because he never actually did”
Yiannopolous is scum regardless of whether he has ever engaged in statutory rape or not. Thank God he has had his deserved comeuppance.
He preaches hatred and division, he undermines critical thought and intellectual discourse in favor of prejudice and bullying. And as many analysts have noted, he is essentially a minstrel…dressed in the gay equivalent of blackface, he has provided the self-hating image the alt-right desired of him.
He is against marriage equality. He is against equal protection under the law. He believes he (and all of us) are damaged and should be straight.
What is most amusing about this is that it seemed clear to me that as soon as he said or did anything that negated his image as eunuch/toady/amusing fag, his hetero regressive audience would turn against him immediately. I was right.
Hopefully he will go back to England and never peddle his cynical hatred here again.
DCguy
I Love the lying troll on here trying to claim it was a smear campaign and his words were taken out of context. I get that that is the memo the trolls were all handed but….
Please detail which words were out of context. The part that showed him speaking was not chopped up.
The best part is that it was a Conservative Group that splashed that video all over the internet. Breitbart and the folks at CPAC already knew about his comments because he gave them when he was a Senior editor at Breitbart. They just didn’t care until it went so public.
loren_1955
Suicide rates for gays may be down across the country except for Utah. There the rate is the same or higher. Why? The continued oppressive Mormon stance against homosexuality with their unwillingness to integrate gays into and part of the fold. To this day, Mormon families still abandon their gay child often left to survive as prostitutes and/or drug dealers or worse suicide. Even with a willingness to allow gays into the congregations, the church standard is total celibacy, and that is not normal celibate…that means no touching, no kissing, no sitting with a same gender friend, no dates with the same gender, etc. Responding to ones truth means a person is banished to hell and separated from loves ones for eternity. Basically a life in hell on earth.
Kangol
@HighCheekBones, are you for freaking real? There are multiple clips of Milo Yiannopoulos talking quite casually and enthusiastically about pedophilia and pederasty. No one took his words out of context. Look at ALL his clips on the topic. He’s pretty clear he thinks it’s OK. It’s actually appalling that you would post that self-serving clip of his, which he posted only to save his horrible racist, misogynistic, transphobic ass because everyone, including conservatives, are cutting him loose. You should write him and tell him you’ll pay his way since his CONservative friends are kicking now that he’s down. Tell your employer too that you agree with what he said, and that it was just “taken out of context,” and see what the response is.
DCguy
Why do you think the GOP wants to get rid of anything that mentions LGBTs?
The LIKE it when lgbt teens either kill themselves or stay miserable in the closet and get into fake marriages.
Either way they don’t have to deal with them and can pretend they don’t exist.