Suicide rates among teenagers in the US have dropped, and researchers are tying this to the legalization of same-sex marriage.
According to statistics, suicide attempts among high school students fell by at least 7% on average after legalization. The impact was most significant among gay, lesbian and bisexual teens, who saw a 14% dro in suicide attempts after same-sex marriage laws were passed, The Guardian reports.
Julia Raifman, co-author of the research from Johns Hopkins University, said she hoped their study would raise awareness to the scale of the issue.
I would hope that policymakers and the public would consider the potential health implications of laws and policies affecting LGBT rights.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that suicide is the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 24, with higher rates for those who identify as sexual minorities.
Raifman said, “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.”
Raifman and colleagues from Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital looked at the impact of same-sex marriage legalization in order to determine what was behind the disparities. Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, and 36 more states have followed since.
The researchers examined data collected by the CDC as part of its Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which had figures from over 760,000 students collected from 1999 to 2015. They analyzed the number for states that passed the law before and after legalization.
The data covered 32 of the 35 states that had legalized same-sex marriage by January 2015, and was compared to 15 states that did not have the same. Before same-sex marriage became legal, suicide rates averaged 8.6% per year, reaching as much as 28.5% among those who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or “not sure.”
In total, states that legalized same-sex marriage saw attempted suicide rates drop by 0.6% against states that did not, which came up to an average fall of 7%.
Raifman said, “There are a number of potential mechanisms. 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.”
The study was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
