Society’s Role in Helping with Those Issues
Cali Spilker
HEDU 5300-002
Introduction The LGBTQ community has been around in the world for longer than most people know. Many might assume identifying as a gender other than male or female or having a sexuality other than heterosexual is a new thing, but it is in fact something that has been around for years. Native Americans had the ideology in their community and accepted it for years until European Christian values came to the country (Orgbon, 2012.) In Europe, itself, there was little effort to understand the LGBTQ community. One scientist that studied human sexual behavior, Sigmund Freud, didn’t consider homosexuality to be an illness as …show more content…
(SAMHSA, 2012, p. 12-13.”) Having a different identification can bring a different range of health issues, however there are common health issues in the community such as mental health, suicide, STDs (especially for gay men,) substance abuse, as well as some physical health issues like heart disease, cancer, and …show more content…
Lesbians tend to suffer from emotional distress, this results from things such as negative reactions from family or traumatic situations. Gay men have high rates of depression in society and can have a severe version of it when they “stay in the closet.” Bisexual people have similar mental stressors compared to lesbian and gay people. Except, there is a difficulty with finding support since it may be slim. Any info for the mental health of transgender people is limited, due to the use of transgender vs non-transgender data, but some studies show transgender woman have a higher rate of attempting or thinking of suicide (SAMHSA, 2012, p. 26, 31, 41& 47.)
Suicide is a common factor among all these groups and a serious one. Stressors starting in teenage years are the main cause for this. Factor such as not being accepted, isolation from family, suppression, bullying, and abuse can happen in these early years. These cause people to be unhappy with their lives and raise the risk for suicide. With transgender people, studies have found suicide attempts can range from 16 to 32%, a rate that is concerningly high (SAMHSA, 2012, p. 47.) Physical