Findings from a recent survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth, show transgender, gay and nonbinary teens have worse mental health than their peers—and school policies targeting them contribute to their mental health struggles.
The data comes from the Trevor Project's 2024 national survey on mental health, gathered from more than 28,500 LGBTQ+ young people in the United States. Now in its sixth year, the survey gives researchers a comprehensive look at the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth. One bright spot: there is strong evidence that supportive actions by the adults in their lives have a measurable impact on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people, according to senior researcher Jonah DeChants.
How to Show Support
One positive finding from the Trevor Project’s data is that the rate of depression and anxiety reported among LGBTQ+ youth is slightly lower in 18- to 24-year-olds than among adolescents 13 to 17.
Two hypotheses on the dip are that LGBTQ+ youth simply have more control over their lives and are able to express themselves more freely after 18, DeChants explains, and that mental health generally improves as people mature.
“You may develop better coping mechanisms or seek medical care that starts working,” DeChants says. “There are, of course, folks who experience poor mental health in their 20s, but in general, adolescence is a tough time to be a person with a brain.”
Transgender and nonbinary youth overall reported higher rates of anxiety and depression than their cisgender peers.
The Trevor Project asked transgender and nonbinary youth (TGNB on the chart) how the people in their lives can show support. The top response was “trusting that I know who I am.”
The survey participants said they wanted their parents and caregivers in particular to be kind and speak respectfully of their LGBTQ+ friends and partners, support their gender expression, respect their pronouns and learn about LGBTQ+ issues.
“Our data on schools and more broadly tell the same story, and that is that when LGBT young people have access to people who support them,” DeChants says, “whether that's people in their home or people at school like teachers, administrators, school counselors — they report better mental health and lower suicide risk.”
The same is true when students attend schools with what DeChants calls affirming policies, like having a gender-neutral bathroom or a chapter of the Genders the Sexualities Alliances.
Just 6 percent of trans and nonbinary youth said their caregivers took part in all the supportive behaviors that applied to them.
About 60 percent said their caregivers did about half of the supportive actions, and 17 percent said their caregivers did none.
Researchers found that “an increase of just one supportive action from parents and caregivers was associated with 6 percent lower odds of a suicide attempt in the past year.”
Real-World Effects
The most recent survey data was collected during what the Trevor Project called a record year for anti-LGBTQ+ policies in public schools.
These policies “have existed to some extent for a long time, but they are very much in the zeitgeist right now. Whether we're talking about bans on trans kids playing sports or accessing gendered school facilities,” DeChants says, “those are being proposed and passed in record numbers right now. That was why it was really important for us to ask about that in the most recent survey.”
Results revealed that as the number of anti-LGBTQ policies at schools increased, so did the number of LGBTQ+ students reporting anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempting suicide within the past year.
“The fact that all four of those outcomes are all significantly related [to anti-LGBTQ+ policies], for me it tells how pervasive and strong that relationship is in a way that even goes beyond the numbers,” DeChants says.
Nearly one-third of survey participants enrolled in school said their school had at least one anti-LGBTQ+ policy. The rate was higher — 36 percent — for Native and Indigenous LGBTQ+ students. Students in the southern United States were also more likely to report their school having at least one anti-LGBTQ+ policy.
Students at schools with anti-LGBTQ+ policies also reported higher rates of harassment related to discrimination, including verbal harassment, physical attacks and being disciplined for fighting back against bullies.
Capturing a Diverse Sample
DeChants says the Trevor Project wanted to attract as diverse a sample of the LGBTQ+ community as possible, including demographics like race, income and location.
“We still have a lot of work to do, but compared to folks who are limited to their local community or don't have the same resources, we have an opportunity to really try to capture a broader picture,” he says, “and [a] more nuanced or intersectional picture, which I think is partly what makes our findings really powerful.”
A small sample size can lead to entire racial groups being left out of an analysis, DeChants explains, because their numbers are too small for comparisons to other groups to yield meaningful results. Having access to a sample of 40 people or fewer, as he did in his previous work as university researcher, makes his job harder, DeChants says.
“That's a major limitation, just sort of in the field more broadly, and a major contributor to our lack of knowledge about folks from less representative or less numerically dense groups,” he says.
DeChants says young people want to see themselves reflected in the data. Some have asked the Trevor Project to dive more deeply into the demographics, to perhaps ask participants about physical abilities or whether they’re on the autism spectrum. They also get requests for advocates who want local data, and people who want to know how to act on what they’ve learned. Some of those questions have led the Trevor Project to create guides on topics like supporting the mental health of transgender and nonbinary youth.
“It's very powerful to have young people say, ‘Yes, actually, this thing is correlated with better mental health,’” he says. “I think that it both gives adults and other young people a sense of what [they] can do, and it gives them data that actually shows that those actions are really correlated, that they are impactful.”
