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Queer and transgender students experience depression and consider suicide at four times the rate of their heterosexual and cisgender peers, according to a new study.
Rutgers University culled data from seven national student surveys, which represent almost 90,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students at more than 900 colleges and universities across the country.
Rutgers is lauding the study as the largest analysis of LGBTQ students ever conducted.
"We’ve known that queer and transgender students suffer from depression and anxiety, but we’ve never had a nationwide sample of this size or such a diverse mix of public and private/religious schools," Maren Greathouse, director of the Tyler Clementi Center at Rutgers, said in a statement. "This finding was consistent across all data sets. This shows that this is not just a problem in rural America, it’s a problem everywhere."
Clementi was a gay Rutgers student who died by suicide in 2010. The center named for him studies LGBTQ bias and prejudice among colleges and universities.
The data was pulled from surveys at the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University; the Higher Education Research Institute at University of California, Los Angeles; the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium at UC Berkeley; and the American College Health Association.
Students who identify as queer or transgender are three times more likely to report self-injury in the last year versus their heterosexual or non-transgender peers, the study found.
Nearly one-third of the queer students and 32 percent of the trans students reported being so depressed that it was difficult to function, twice the percentage reported by their heterosexual and cis counterparts.
“All the things we've heard anecdotally over the years have been confirmed though this study,” Greathouse said.
