Original articleDifferences in Mental Health Symptoms Across Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning Youth in Primary Care Settings
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 2,513 youth (61.2% female and 38.7% male), ages 14 to 24 years (M, 17.24; standard deviation [SD], 2.86). About 75.4% of the sample identified as white (n = 1,894), 4.7% as black/African-American (n = 119), .7% as American-Indian/Alaskan Native (n = 17), 1.8% as Asian (n = 46), .8% as Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander (n = 19), and 8.1% as Multiracial (n = 203). A little >7% (7.6%, n = 192) indicated they were unsure of their race. Over 16% (16.6%, n = 418) of the sample
Results
First, multivariate analyses of variance showed mean differences across the sexual orientation groups on level of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, lifetime suicidality, current suicidality, and substance abuse for both females, F(18,4551) = 6.39, p < .001, partial η2 = .025; and males, F(18,2862) = 3.36, p < .001, partial η2 = .021. As the Levene test indicated unequal variances for some of the scales, we report the F statistic associated with the Pillai trace as it is most robust to
Discussion
Although most LGBQ youth lead happy, healthy lives, a substantial body of literature indicates that LGBQ youth are at increased risk for behavioral health problems [[1], [2], [3], [4], [5]; [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]]. Few researchers, however, have examined differences in mental health symptoms across LGBQ youth, and none to our knowledge have examined these differences using a broad measure of behavioral health symptoms implemented in PC settings. This study screened
Acknowledgments
The Behavioral Health Screening tool is owned by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and licensed to Medical Decision Logic, Inc., a health science informatics and computer science engineering company who make the screening tool commercially available. They had no role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data; writing of the report; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
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The authors have full access to all the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Conflicts of Interest: G.D. will receive some minor royalty payments if and when the Behavioral Health Screen, which was used to collect the data, is made public. None of the other authors have any conflicts of interest to report.
Disclaimer: The sponsors have no role in the study design, collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data; writing the manuscript; or the decision to submit the article for publication.