For years now. many psychologists have expressed that members of the LGBTQ community were likely suffering from mental health issues. While in the last 40 years or so society has largely dismissed those studies as nothing but a conspiracy or lies, the latest annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health confirms it.
Published on June 13th, the report is sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Despite asking about sexual orientation since 2018, the data only focuses on lesbians, gays, and bisexual people. The transgendered community will be accounted for starting next year. This year’s report focuses on data from 2021 and 2022.
According to the report, those who have been identifying as bisexual face discrimination like other members of the group, but “invisibility and erasure” as well as a general lack of support are the highest of those surveyed. Females in the group were six times more likely than their straight counterparts to be suicidal. They were also three times more likely to become addicted to opioids.
The males weren’t any better. The bisexual ones reported a threefold increase in the need for serious mental illness assistance than straight ones. A third of all bisexual people as a whole and the males directly reported substance abuse disorder in the year before.
Reports like these serve to better confirm the coalition of mental health activities and outlandish sexual proclivities. For eons now, the church has warned us of this and how it would be the downfall of our society. As we have seen before, part of that has always been the crazed rising to power.
Both women, as well as people of color, were also reporting additional mental health and substance abuse issues. To the point where 1 in 4 bisexual females and 1 in 7 lesbian females reported major depressive disorders in the preceding year. Bisexual and lesbian females also were more likely to have been binge drinking and twice as likely to be heavy drinkers.
Binge drinking is defined as when a woman has more than four drinks in one sitting or five for men. Meanwhile, heavy drinking is binge drinking for five or more days within the previous 30 days.
Surprisingly, smoking rates as well as binge and heavy drinking were the same across gay, straight, and bisexual men. Given the rates of substance abuse among them and the female population they all shared a common use for marijuana both in medicinal, recreational, and black markets.
According to the researchers, they can’t quite pinpoint why they have more mental health issues and substance use rates. They want to find an answer but have yet to be able to. For Dr. Jeremy Kidd who has been working on these kinds of studies for years, he sees SAMHSA pushing out the data as the best thing for his research and getting funding.
One of their theories is that something they now call “minority stress” could be a huge culprit of the problems. Kidd said, “For instance, you can imagine being in environments that might be validating of people who have gay and lesbian identities but might either not recognize bisexual identity – so they are sort of invisible in that space – or might be really invalidating of individuals with bisexual identity, even while the environment is affirming or at least a little more neutral to folks who are gay or lesbian.”
Other medical difficulties like arthritis, obesity, and gastrointestinal problems are prolific in bisexuals, regardless of gender. For men, high cholesterol, blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease are higher as well. He claims that just having people see them would fix the whole issue because it changes the narrative for them.
The problem with this is that they continue to try and force this on every person they encounter. They become so obsessed with this part of their personality that it becomes their entire identity, and it becomes all they can ever discuss. Normal relationships become impossible, and everything revolves around them. Aka, classic narcissists.
