Check that out. Letting people know they belong is good for those people.
Check that out. Letting people know they belong is good for those people.
#SameSexMarriage #lgbq #suicide
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
It's really nice to be able to share good news for once. A new study in JAMA Pediatrics studied the effect of same-sex marriage laws on teen suicide rates. They looked at 32 different US states which changed their laws at different times, as a way of disentangling this effect from other effects.
The net result? Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to a 7% overall drop in teen suicide attempts, and a 14% drop among LGBT teens.
It turns out that being publicly told that you're an accepted member of society and not a pariah does make a difference in people's lives, especially teenagers. Who woulda thunk?
But the upshot of this is: All of you who worked on this, in one way or another? You just saved some lives. Well done.
The article itself is available online: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2604258
(NB: For clarity, that's a 7% drop in the rate, not a seven percentage point drop drop. We should be so lucky as to have any one thing eliminate seven percentage points. As a baseline, a weighted 8.6% of all high school students, and 28.5% of LGBT high school students, attempted suicide in the year before same-sex marriage legalization. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among people aged 15-24 in the US.
For those who want technical notes: The paper seems to have done a very careful job on statistics, testing a wide variety of alternate hypotheses and ruling them out from the data. One test worth calling out: the two-year leading indicator (suicide rates two years prior to law changes) was not correlated to suicide rates, indicating that this was not triggered by general changes in the state which were also leading to this; the two-year trailing indicator (two years after), however, was correlated, with the same correlation as the immediate future, indicating a lasting effect rather than a one-off.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/drop-in-teenage-suicide-attempts-linked-to-legalisation-of-same-sex-marriage?CMP=twt_gu
#SameSexMarriage #lgbq #suicide
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
It's really nice to be able to share good news for once. A new study in JAMA Pediatrics studied the effect of same-sex marriage laws on teen suicide rates. They looked at 32 different US states which changed their laws at different times, as a way of disentangling this effect from other effects.
The net result? Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to a 7% overall drop in teen suicide attempts, and a 14% drop among LGBT teens.
It turns out that being publicly told that you're an accepted member of society and not a pariah does make a difference in people's lives, especially teenagers. Who woulda thunk?
But the upshot of this is: All of you who worked on this, in one way or another? You just saved some lives. Well done.
The article itself is available online: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2604258
(NB: For clarity, that's a 7% drop in the rate, not a seven percentage point drop drop. We should be so lucky as to have any one thing eliminate seven percentage points. As a baseline, a weighted 8.6% of all high school students, and 28.5% of LGBT high school students, attempted suicide in the year before same-sex marriage legalization. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among people aged 15-24 in the US.
For those who want technical notes: The paper seems to have done a very careful job on statistics, testing a wide variety of alternate hypotheses and ruling them out from the data. One test worth calling out: the two-year leading indicator (suicide rates two years prior to law changes) was not correlated to suicide rates, indicating that this was not triggered by general changes in the state which were also leading to this; the two-year trailing indicator (two years after), however, was correlated, with the same correlation as the immediate future, indicating a lasting effect rather than a one-off.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/drop-in-teenage-suicide-attempts-linked-to-legalisation-of-same-sex-marriage?CMP=twt_gu
Comments
Not being an a-hole, though you might disagree... If true LGBTQ suicide rates mirror rates for sexually abused teens. Also, a 7% net number is probably within the margin of error or if at all, barely statistically significant.
No matter the side this is a horrible tragedy for a people who are longing for significance.