“I don’t want to live,” mass murderer Audrey Hale messaged a former basketball teammate minutes before killing six Christians inside Nashville’s Covenant School on March 27. “I just want to die.”
A series of heartbreaking studies show how far she was from alone. Americans who identify as LGBTQ suffer from mental illness, depression, and suicidal thoughts at far higher rates than their peers, multiple reports have confirmed. Mental health plummets further for teenagers who have engaged in same-sex intercourse.
“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 Biden administration report released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Teenagers who identified as LGBTQ were twice as likely to report “poor mental health” as those who identified as heterosexual, three times as likely to have “seriously considered attempting suicide” or “made a suicide plan,” and 366.6% more likely to have attempted suicide. Not only do they contemplate suicide more frequently, but they are 700% more likely to have injured themselves in a suicide attempt. While only three out of every 100 straight students have been injured in a suicide attempt, the number soars to one out of every seven teens who identifies as LGBTQ.
“Nearly 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness … and more than 20% of LGBQ+ students attempted suicide,” said the CDC report.
That aligns with reports from transgender facilities that target minors in their teens — and younger. Jamie Reed, a whistleblower at a pediatric transgender facility in St. Louis, revealed that “nearly all children who came to the Center here presented with very serious mental health problems,” including autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma histories, OCD, and serious eating disorders. Separate studies have shown people who consider themselves transgender or nonbinary are up to six times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as the general population.
Doctors at the facility ignored children’s underlying mental health issues and used high-pressure sales tactics to convince parents to put their children on puberty blockers and begin gender transition, Reed said.
The CDC data also comport with data from around the world, including a study published last summer in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which found:
“Compared with cisgender, heterosexual adolescents, transgender adolescents [in Canada] showed 5 times the risk of suicidal ideation and 7.6 times the risk of suicide attempt. Among cisgender adolescents, girls attracted to girls had 3.6 times the risk of previous-year suicidal ideation and 3.3 times the risk of having ever attempted suicide, compared with their heterosexual peers. Adolescents attracted to multiple genders had 2.5 times the risk of suicidal ideation and 2.8 times the risk of suicide attempt.”
LGBT activists often ascribe high levels of depression and anxiety among those attracted to the same sex, or who believe they are members of the opposite sex, to social rejection and “homophobia/transphobia” — which they claim is latent in society and active among people of faith. Yet the same mental health trends prevail in societies that have mainstreamed the LGBTQ message. In Sweden, a 2016 study 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.”
Rather than blame biological terms and conventions that have defined civilization for millennia for the mental health issues of trans-identifying individuals, some social researchers suggest authorities should analyze the long-term effects produced by the glut of cross-sex hormone injections. “In our current climate, there is no sensible monitoring of the psychological effects of minors or adults taking cross-sex hormones or engaged in any aspect of gender-affirming care,” Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Family Studies, wrote in The Washington Stand.
Cross-sex hormones are far from the only illicit drug teenagers who identify as LGBTQ consume, the CDC discovered. Young people who described themselves as LGBTQ were more than 90% more likely to have ever used illicit drugs (specifically cocaine, inhalants, heroin, methamphetamines, hallucinogens, or ecstasy) than those who call themselves heterosexuals. They were also more than twice as likely to have ever misused potentially deadly prescription opioids such as codeine, Vicodin, OxyContin, Hydrocodone, or Percocet.
Those who have homosexual sex are nearly three times as likely to currently misuse those opioids than heterosexuals.
Americans who adopt an LGBTQ identity are the most likely cohort of teenagers to use marijuana — which is itself linked to higher levels of depression, anxiety, and psychosis. Sexual activity increases the likelihood of drug and alcohol use/abuse among all teens, but young people committing homosexual acts have the highest likelihood of substance use/abuse by far.
The CDC study found that, while engaging in sexual activity significantly increases the rates of mental health pathologies among all teens, it has less of an effect on those who identify as LGBTQ, implying that accepting the message of the LGBTQ movement is the driving factor harming young people.
“Unfortunately,” concluded Bauwens, “the tragedy at The Covenant School proves to be one more big piece of evidence suggesting that gender-affirming care (whether social or physiological) is not doing what it set out to do — treat mental health issues.”
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.