Statistics about Suicide among LGBTQ Youth Reinforce Need for Open Discussions
- Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people ages 10 to 24.
- LGB youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth.
- LGB youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth.
- LGB youth who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection.
- Each episode of LGBT victimization, such as physical or verbal harassment or abuse, increases the likelihood of self-harming behavior by 2.5 times on average.
Jessica Verpeut Serves as a Role Model in Several Ways
Jessica Verpeut (left) with her wife, Danielle, at the San Francisco pride festival
If anyone needs proof that someone can be successful despite being lesbian and having had mental health challenges, that proof is Jessica Verpeut. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University in 2010, was a researcher at Princeton University and recently launched a new career as an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Arizona State University. She is running her own research lab, studying the behavioral neuroscience of social behavior and autism in the Department of Psychology, where she will also be the youngest faculty member, in addition to being one of relatively few women in science fields overall.
Danielle, AIR Therapy Dog Hunter and Jess outside of the Princeton art museum
Growing up, Jess kept to herself a lot. She struggled with mental health issues, which she said is common in the LGBTQ commu-nity. “There were so many feelings that we didn’t know were normal,” she said. She grew up in the 1990s before the Internet and when the only role model for LGTBQ individuals was actress and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. “She became an icon for people to feel they can succeed, though it is difficult,” Jess said.
>Now, LGBTQ is portrayed on the Internet and in the media and there are more role models. “We’re starting to see people willing to be on our side. This was not always the case in the past,” Jess said.
Jess’s parents were born in the 1950s when the dominant focus was on white males. “They felt my life and career would be over because I’m lesbian,” she said. It took a long time for her family to accept, but they’ve come around. Her sister, who is three years younger, has always been “an incredible source of support.”
Jess was raised in a Roman Catholic household and went to Bible Camp. The culture was very non-accepting. She attended a rural high school, where people were not open to others being different. In college, she encountered “a mixture of ideas and people, which made things a lot easier.” However, she didn’t meet other lesbians that she knew of at the time, although she discovered during a college reunion that some of her classmates are lesbian.
“I graduated from Rutgers in 2010, the year Tyler Clementi died,” Jess recalled, refer-ring to the college freshman who died by suicide following an incident of cyber-bullying, consisting of a secretly recorded video of him intimately involved with another young man. “It made me realize that teachers need to be on the side of students.”
