Americans who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are far more likely to suffer from major depression, abuse illegal drugs, and are up to six times as likely to attempt suicide, according to a new report from the Biden administration. Although the report admits it cannot “explain the reasons” for these differences, it opens by blaming LGBT “invisibility and erasure” — a leap critics say is “just bad science” that obscures the real causes for their mental distress.
Adults who have sex with members of the same sex, or both sexes, experience a dramatically lower quality of life across numerous measures, the Biden administration reveals. Women who have sex with members of both sexes (bisexuals) were six times as likely to have attempted suicide within the last year as women who identify as straight, and three times as likely to abuse opioid drugs. Bisexual men were three times as likely to have had a serious mental illness in the last year, according to the survey from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
“A higher prevalence of substance use and mental health issues has been well-documented among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (also referred to as sexual minorities) than among those who identify as heterosexual or straight,” notes the report, which focuses on American adults’ behaviors during the 2021-2022 year.
Drug Abuse, Suicide, and Depression
The Biden administration survey documents the high rates at which “sexual minorities” suffer from the intertwined pathologies of drug abuse and negative mental health outcomes.
Drug abuse rates, spanning from methamphetamines to tobacco, were multiple orders higher among gay- or bisexual-identified people than heterosexuals. People who identify as bisexual, of either sex, had the highest levels of illegal drug use. Half of all bisexual men and women (49.5% and 49.7%, respectively) had used illicit drugs, as well as 42% of women who identify as lesbians and 41% of men who have sex with men (MSM) — double the rates of heterosexual men and women (27% and 20%, respectively).
Those living the LGBT lifestyle had a strong propensity to abuse the hardest narcotics. Lesbians were twice as likely, and bisexual women more than three times as likely to use “cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, and methamphetamine,” or to abuse prescription drugs (19.4% of bisexual women compared to 13.8% of lesbians, and 6.7% of straight women). Lesbians were 253% more likely to use cocaine than straight women. Bisexual women were 360% more likely to misuse opioids than straight women over the last year. Gay or lesbian-identified adults were twice as likely to abuse hallucinogenic drugs than heterosexuals.
The trend continues to legal drugs, as well. “Sexual minority females” were twice as likely to smoke tobacco or “have been heavy drinkers in the past month,” according to the SAMHSA report, officially titled the “Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Behavioral Health: Results from the 2021 and 2022 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health.”
Similar numbers held true for males — although men have higher levels of substance abuse in general. “Gay males were about twice as likely as bisexual males and about 15 times as likely as straight males to have used inhalants in the past year,” reports SAMHSA. All men abused alcohol at the same rate.
Mental health also proved radically poorer among people who identify as LGBT. While women admit to higher levels of mental health challenges than men, LGBT-identified people of both sexes suffered significantly elevated levels of serious mental illness, major depressive episodes, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.
People who identify as gay were twice as likely as straight people to have serious mental illness, and bisexuals were three times as likely. “Sexual minorities” were also twice as likely to suffer from any mental illness.
Homosexual or bisexual-identified people were more likely to suffer a major depressive episode — defined as at least one period during the past year that lasted two weeks or longer when the individual felt depressed for most of the day nearly every day, and “had problems with sleeping, eating, energy, concentration, self-worth, or having recurrent thoughts of death or recurrent suicidal ideation.” One quarter of bisexual women and one out of every seven lesbians experienced a major depressive episode, compared to 9.1% of straight women; discrepancies were higher among men, with bisexuals sidelined by depression more than three times as often as heterosexual men.
Self-identified homosexuals, lesbians, and bisexuals suffered from the most severe form of depression — suicidal ideation — magnitudes higher than their heterosexual peers. “The prevalence of making a suicide plan in the past year was highest among bisexual males, followed by gay males, then by straight males,” the survey says. Bisexual women were five times as likely, and lesbians were four times as likely, to have made a suicide plan as heterosexual females. Bisexual women were six times as likely to attempt suicide than straight women; lesbians have three times the suicide rate of straight women. Bisexual men were four times as likely, and gay men three times as likely, as straight men.
The report notes “sexual minorities” were more likely to suffer the twin pathologies of substance abuse disorder and any mental illness at the same time. “Sexual minority females were about 2 to 3 times more likely than straight females to have had both AMI and an SUD in the past year,” with LGB-identified men experiencing both conditions at twice the rate of heterosexual men.
Higher levels of mental illness and substance abuse in the LGB survey of adults mirror the results of a similar government study of LGBT-identified teenagers. “Female students, LGBQ+ students, and students who had any same-sex partners were more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,” said a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released in February. “Nearly 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness … and more than 20% of LGBQ+ students attempted suicide.”
This year’s SAMHSA survey included only sexual practice: homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual. The 2023 survey will include a category for people who identify as transgender.
‘Bad Science’ Ignores Childhood Trauma, Blames ‘Erasure’
Although the report concluded that its report does “not explain the reasons for these differences,” the opening asserted, “People who identify as bisexual may experience additional problems with substance use and mental health due to sexual orientation-based discrimination, bisexual invisibility and erasure, and a lack of bisexual-affirmative support.”
But a statistical report should not jump to conclusions it did not study, nor include “polemical language,” Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “The survey isn’t even about erasure,” said Bauwens. “The conclusion doesn’t match the nature of the report. It speaks to the fact that there’s a bigger agenda going on here. It’s just really bad ‘science’ all the way around.”
Expert researchers shared her views. “Speaking of ‘erasure,’ pro-LGBTQ elites will do anything to erase the reality of the pathologies that are invariably connected to ‘gay,’ lesbian, bisexual, and now transgender behaviors and lifestyles,” Peter LaBarbera, founder and president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, told TWS. “It’s been this way ever since ‘gay liberation’ began conquering American institutions and compromising their integrity from the inside out.”
Bauwens said the report’s authors ignored more likely underlying traumas. “One of the most glaring [omissions] has been documented over and over again”: Every segment of the population identifying as LGBT has “higher rates of adverse childhood events compared to the general population: They have so much more physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, and trauma in childhood.”
“That’s also evidence in the substance abuse research, particularly those who use opioids, almost always had sexual abuse,” Bauwens added.
A review of 75 studies on abuse among people who identify with the LGBT community found up to three out of four lesbians and 59% of men who have sex with men reported childhood sexual abuse. Sexual molestation victims often say their abuse informed their later sexual practice. A 2001 study found men who have sex with men were 657% more likely, and lesbians were 2,200% more likely to have been molested as children than their heterosexual counterparts. “[H]omosexually molested participants were more likely to say that the molestation had an impact on their sexual orientation than heterosexually molested participants,” according to a 2010 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. (The perpetrator was a homosexual in 80% of abused boys and 95% of molested girls, the study found — conclusions that echo the work of Dr. Judith Reisman.)
In the U.K., the abuse rate of men who identify as gay or bisexual is 10 times the national average (49%). “LGBTs report childhood sexual abuse” and mental illness “at 3x-8x the rate of heterosexuals,” found Clayton Cramer.
In all, 83% of people who identify as LGBT reported experiencing at least one adverse childhood experiences (ACE), 20% higher than heterosexuals, and they were more than twice as likely to report experiencing three ACEs or more, according to a 2022 study published in the Journal of American Medical Association Psychiatry. The study’s author, Nathaniel Tran, is a graduate research associate at Vanderbilt University’s LGBTQ+ Policy Lab and uses they/him pronouns. Vanderbilt University operated a transgender facility that carried out procedures on minors — which Dr. Shayne Taylor explained are a “big money maker” — until a new Tennessee law restricted the procedures to adults on June 1.
All of these adverse impacts increase the likelihood of poor mental health and substance abuse.
“If I were coming to this data with eyes wide open, I would ask, ‘Did you have childhood sexual abuse?’” Dr. Bauwens told TWS. “That opens a whole other intervention diagnostic and intervention pathway.”
Unfortunately, “these types of surveys, and a lot of the LGBT research period, starts with this premise that some of these negative mental health reports or suicidal issues have to do with the stress that this population experiences” due to alleged homophobia. As a result the studies, and the psychologists who rely on them, are “never making an accurate assessment of the real problem and therefore, they’re never giving the right intervention.”
These ideologically driven misdiagnoses do “disservice to this community,” said Bauwens.
Yet the narrative continued as the media released the SAMHSA study, quoting Jeremy Kidd, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who teaches students how to “provide affirming healthcare for LGBTQ+ patients.” Kidd blamed low LGBT mental health on society’s allegedly overly conservative sexual views. “You can imagine being in environments that might be validating of people who have gay and lesbian identities but might either not recognize bisexual identity — so they are sort of invisible in that space.”
“LGBT individuals experience additional stress as a result of discrimination and stigma,” Kidd said during the middle of Pride Month.
Yet erasure could not explain why a 2016 study in Sweden concluded that people legally married to members of the same sex “evidence a higher risk of suicide than other married individuals, after adjustment for confounders.”
‘This Is the Moment for the Christian Remnant to Shine’
While Americans should demand honesty from government reports, LaBarbera said, “Christians and other truth-seekers can take some solace in sexual revolutionaries’ intellectually dishonest attempts to sanitize homosexuality and related immoral behaviors — because they’re telegraphing that they know the pathology is rooted in high-risk and destructive LGBTQ behaviors themselves. Like smart citizens living under lying communist regimes, we have to read through the lines, discern the truth, and spread it in the culture.”
“This is the moment for the Christian remnant to shine in a dying culture,” LaBarbera told TWS, “all the while giving hope to the sin-addicted by pointing out that there is a better way to live: God’s way through the grace and power of Jesus Christ.”
AUTHOR
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.
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