Some good news: Drop in teenage suicide attempts since same-sex marriage legalized

This is nice to see. Its nice to get some uplifting news

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/d … x-marriage

Suicide attempts among high school students fell by an average of 7% following implementation of same-sex marriage laws, say researchers

Legalisation of same-sex marriage in US states has been linked to a drop in suicide attempts among teenagers.

Researchers say suicide attempts among high school students fell by an average of 7% following the implementation of the legislation. The impact was especially significant among gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers, for whom the passing of same-sex marriage laws was linked to a 14% drop in suicide attempts.

Julia Raifman, co-author of the research from Johns Hopkins University, said she hoped the research would help to draw wider attention to the scale of the issue among sexual minorities. “I would hope that policymakers and the public would consider the potential health implications of laws and policies affecting LGBT rights,” she added.

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According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the second leading cause of death for those aged between 15 and 24, with suicide rates much higher among those who identify as sexual minorities than heterosexual students.

“This study was really motivated by evidence that there are large disparities across domains of health that affect LGBT adolescents,” said Raifman. “I was interested in whether larger structural issues were potentially leading to those disparities.”

In an attempt to unpick the possibility, Raifman and colleagues focused on the impact of same-sex marriage legislation. In 2004 Massachusetts became the first US state to legalise same-sex marriage. Another 36 states then followed before the policy became federal law in June 2015.

Published in the journal Jama Pediatrics by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital, the study scrutinised data collected by the CDC as part of its Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System – a survey conducted every two years.

The team analysed figures from more than 760,000 students collected between 1999 and 2015, with data for states that passed a same-sex marriage law examined before and after the event – an approach, the researchers say, that took into account a host of differences existing between the states.

In total the data covered 32 of the 35 states that had passed legislation to legalise same-sex marriage by 1 January 2015. The change in the rate of suicide attempts was then compared to that seen for the 15 states that did not.

The analysis revealed that in the years before same-sex marriage became legal, the self-reported rate of one or more suicide attempts among high school students across all states was, on average, around 8.6% per year, with the figure reaching 28.5% among those who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or “not sure”. Students were not specifically asked if they identified as transgender, queer or intersex.