Safe School Environments Make a Difference in Youth Mental Health
A recent HYD-PRC study found that young people with multiple minoritized identities experienced a third to half less emotional distress when they did not experience bias-based bullying and harassment at school. In other words, adults have both the power and the responsibility to create environments free from stigma and bias.
This is good news for youth-serving adults trying to be part of the solution to the United States’ mental health crisis. Rates of depression and anxiety are high among adolescents, and suicide is a leading cause of death in this age group. According to the CDC’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, approximately 9% of high school students have attempted suicide. The 2019 Minnesota Student Survey tells us that Minnesota’s rate is 8.4%.
Minority stressors – including experiences of structural oppression – compound general stressors, contributing to the disproportionately high prevalence of mental health disorders seen among people of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender diverse, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) people. Several past studies have identified disparities in emotional distress among youth across social identities. But these are limited by inclusion of only two social identities (e.g., sexual orientation and race), and statistical approaches that cannot account for peoples' lived experiences.
A forthcoming paper in Pediatrics on emotional distress disparities across multiple intersecting social identities quantifies the research team’s hypotheses about the outsized impact that bias-based bullying has on the mental health of adolescents with minoritized identities. The HYD-PRC study shows that young people with minoritized sexual and gender identities who were also the targets of bias-based bullying were the most likely to experience emotional distress.
For example, suicidal ideation was reported among 81% of bisexual youth who identified as transgender or gender diverse when they were also the targets of bullying based on their sexual orientation. But the prevalence of suicidal ideation was reduced to 56% among bisexual trans and gender diverse youth who did not report bias-based bullying.
Using data from the 2019 Minnesota Student Survey, researchers examined how social identities (racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identity) and two forms of bias-based bullying (racist, homophobic/transphobic) correspond to depression, anxiety, self-injury, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. Researchers used Exhaustive CHAID, a series of chi-square tests to build a decision tree that identifies groups with similar rates of the outcome until no further differences are statistically significant. In other words, researchers used sophisticated intersectional data analysis to expand what we know (and what is knowable) about emotional distress among youth across multiple social positions.
In so doing, the team was able to spotlight the potential of working to reduce and eliminate bias-based bullying to reduce mental health disparities among LGBTQ+ adolescents. Creating safer school environments by eliminating bias and ensuring that bias-based bullying does not continue can reduce emotional distress for youth with minoritized identities. And, prevention and intervention matter, especially for pansexual and bisexual youth and transgender, gender diverse, and gender questioning youth. Intervening effectively depends on youth serving adults understanding these subtleties.