LGBTQ youths struggle with mental health issues, survey finds

The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people, recently surveyed about 40,000 LGBTQ people across the United States who were ages 13-24 to gain insight regarding mental health, among other topics.

A key finding was that 40 percent of the respondents said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year. While troubling, those statistics weren’t a shock to public health experts.

“I think we know that LGBTQ youth are a vulnerable population and I think we could do so much more to support them,” says Jessica Bernacki, a licensed clinical psychologist at the UCLA Gender Health Program, who was not a part of the Trevor Project research team.