Supporting LGBT Lives? Complicating the suicide consensus in LGBT mental health research

Abstract

This article locates itself within an emergent, counter-discursive body of scholarship that is critical of universalizing depictions portraying queer-identified or LGBT youth as vulnerable and 'at-risk' of a range of negative mental health outcomes, including selfharm and suicidality. Drawing on key findings from a large-scale, mixed-methods study exploring the mental health and well-being of LGBT people, we seek to contribute to the development of a more expansive understanding of LGBT lives by demonstrating the diverse ways people engage with their sexuality and gender identity and illuminating the complex meanings that those LGBT people who have experienced psychological and suicidal distress ascribe to their feelings, thoughts and actions.

A Sociological Critique of Youth Strategies and Educational Policies that Address LGBTQ Youth Issues

“…When the statistical data on suicidality were considered in conjunction with qualitative data derived from the Supporting LGBT Lives study (Mayock et al 2009), a complicated and highly nuanced picture of LGBTQ mental health and suicidality emerged. This was particularly evident in relation to the meanings that those participants who had felt suicidal and/or who had acted on these suicidal thoughts, ascribed to their suicidal feelings and actions (Bryan and Mayock 2017). Participants' narrative accounts of their self-injurious behaviour or suicidal feelings or actions illuminated the extent to which these experiences are often attributable to a range of overlapping factors that cannot be reduced to monocausal explanation.…”

“…This methodological approach allowed for a far more detailed engagement with motives as well as meanings that helped to locate, contextualise, and understand self-harm and suicidality than the online survey approach alone allowed. This mixedmethods approach yielded a greater diversity of divergent views and experiences than single paradigm probing might have permitted and also placed an onus on the researchers to speak to all aspects and complexities of the data presented to them (Bryan and Mayock 2017).…”

“…Marshall 2010;Talburt 2010;Talburt and Rasmussen 2010). It builds on the author's earlier published work which engaged with the complex consequences and effects of LGBTQ mental health research by "speaking back" to risk-based narratives that foreclose more complex and critical engagement with queerness and with the heteronormative structures that fuel homophobia and transphobia (Bryan 2017;Bryan and Mayock 2017). This earlier work sought to complicate the so-called "suicide consensus" that has emerged over the last three decades in relation to LGBTQ youth which deems them to be at elevated risk of mental health difficulties and suicidality (Eliason 2010, p. 6), and considered how LGBTQ subjects themselves problematise and resist these discourses of vulnerability and victimhood.…”

Tales From the Chalkface: Using Narratives to Explore Agency, Resilience, and Identity of Gay Teachers

“…Dominant heteronormative discourses in schools often situate teachers with LGBTQ+ identities within exclusionary spaces (Gray et al, 2016). Research has linked these experiences of bullying, violence, invisibility, and alienation with elevated risks of mental ill health, self-harm, and suicidality (Mayock et al, 2009;Bryan and Maycock, 2017). Eliason (2010) conceptualizes the "suicide consensus" (p. 7) that has emerged from over 30 years of research.…”

“…Eliason (2010) conceptualizes the "suicide consensus" (p. 7) that has emerged from over 30 years of research. This research compared the experiences of individuals with LGBTQ+ identities with those of peers whose identities were normative (Bryan and Maycock, 2017). LGBTQ+ teachers are required to negotiate complex personal and professional boundaries (Vicars, 2006;Gray, 2013) and decide whether or not to be visible and open about their private truth (Grace and Benson, 2000).…”