Massive new study says Donald Trump presidency has worsened the mental health of the LGBTQ / LGBTQ Nation

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A new study of 1.06 million Americans found that mental anxiety among LGBTQ Americans increased during the administration of Republican President Donald Trump, arguably the most anti-LGBTQ president. of all time.

The study, published in the journal Economics & Human Biology, looked at responses from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). The BRFSS is a survey of nearly 450,000 adults conducted annually by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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The survey asked respondents how many days in the past 30 days they considered their mental health to be poor. People who responded within 30 days were considered to have experienced severe mental distress.

The study found that respondents identified as LGBTQ experienced a higher increase in severe mental distress than non-LGBTQ respondents.

In 2014, before Trump became president, 7.7 percent of LGBTQ individuals and 4.8 percent of non-LGBTQ individuals reported severe mental distress. By 2019, three years into the Trumps presidency, 12 percent of LGBTQ adults reported severe mental distress, compared to only five percent of non-LGBTQ people.

The increase was higher for LGBTQ individuals who lived in the red states who voted for Trump compared to those who lived in the blue states who voted for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The findings suggest that the Trump administration could affect the mental health of LGBT people, the study’s author Masanori Kuroki, associate professor of economics at Arkansas Tech University, told PsyPost.

However, BRFSS gets a new sample of individuals each year, rather than repeatedly questioning the same individuals over time, PsyPost explains. This limits the ability of researchers to draw many definite conclusions from the survey.

The finding was not causal, and we cannot confidently attribute the rise in mental health anxiety among LGBT people to Trump or his administration, Kuroki said.

However, the study echoed other reports of increasing mental distress since the Trump presidency.

Previous studies have found that the suicide hotline called Trans Lifeline as four times after Trump’s attacks on transgender people, the trans teen’s suicide attempts may have grown because of his tweets and places that voted for Trump experienced higher reports of school bullying.

In 2017, The Trevor Project’s suicide hotline announced that calls to their helpline had increased in the crisis after Trump’s election as president.

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