HOMOSEXUALITY AND DEPRESSION
HOMOSEXUALITY AND DEPRESSION
HOMOSEXUALITY AND DEPRESSION
Recently, I’ve gotten an up rise in depressed patients and patients with anxiety disorder so I decided to do my next lecture on depression and how it affects the LGBT community.
WHAT IS DEPRESSION?
In psychotherapy and psychiatry, a state of mind producing serious, long-term lowering of enjoyment of life or inability to visualize a happy future.
KEYWORD: LONGTERM.
Not feeling sad or blue but having a long term feeling of sadness or inability to see a happy future.
Depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States. It affects an estimated 15.7 million adults and 2.8 million adolescents in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Depression and anxiety affects LGBT people at higher rates than the heterosexual population, and LGBT youths are more likely than heterosexual students to report high levels of drug use and feelings of depression. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the third leading cause of death among people age 10 to 24 in the United States. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youths in grades 7-12 are twice as likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. Adolescence is a difficult time for many young people and can be especially challenging for LGBT youth. Negative attitudes and cultural stigmas put LGBT youth at a higher risk for bullying, teasing, and physical violence than their heterosexual peers. A hostile school environment affects a student’s performance in school and their mental health. LGBT students who experience victimization and discrimination typically have worse grades and don’t perform as well academically.
Challenges for many LGBT youth don’t stop when the school bell rings. How a parent responds to their LGBT teen can have a tremendous impact on their child’s current and future mental and physical health.
Many parents react negatively upon learning that their teen is LGBT and may even throw them out of the house, while other LGBT teens run away from home due to conflict or stress with their parents. Because of this, LGBT youth are also at a greater risk for homelessness than heterosexual youth.
According to the CDC, stresses experienced by LGBT youth put them at a greater risk for mental health problems and other health risks than heterosexual youths. These health risks include:
Behaviors that contribute to violence, such as carrying a weapon or getting in fights
Behaviors that contribute to unintentional injuries, such as driving without a seatbelt or driving drunk
Tobacco, alcohol, or other drug use
Risky sexual behaviors, such as not using birth
Control
Depression
Suicide or suicide attempts.
Psychologists refer to this contextual process of dealing with persistent prejudice and discrimination as minority stress. Many studies have shown that it has powerful, lasting, and negative impacts on the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ people.
Bottom line: It creates a situation ripe for struggling with anxiety and depression.
Coping with minority stress does not tell the whole story, though, in the lives of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, or transgender individuals. There’s way more to each person’s life than that: Camaraderie, pride, strength, and sense of belonging are found in community, friendship, and the love of other LGBTQ people and their supportive allies. All of us, whether gay, straight, gender conforming or not – or somewhere in between – are more than a constellation of the difficulties that we’ve had to face.
The ways that anxiety and depression are part of your life are determined by many factors. Our bodies, predispositions, and life experiences all play a role.
My advice for LGBTQ people seeking help with their anxiety or depression is this: Seek a professional who gets the larger contextual picture and what it means to be you, and if you know anyone suffering from anxiety or depression do as much as you can to be there for them, regardless of their issues.
Have a lovely week.
WRITTEN BY PSYCHIC FOR PRIDE TV.