Two pro-LGBT academics are trying to draw a parallel between mental health problems of people who are living a homosexual lifestyle and the election and presidential term of Donald Trump, while admitting no direct link can be definitively made from their studies.

But the professors, and the left-wing NBC News Out platform the promotes LGBT lifestyles, tried very hard to make that comparison nonetheless.

Julie Moreau, an NBC News contributor and assistant professor of political science and sexual diversity studies at the University of Toronto, wrote:

Anxiety. Depression. Stress. These are some of the emotions LGBTQ Americans experienced during the Trump administration, according to two recent studies. The reports, conducted independently, both landed on the same conclusion: There was a significant decline in the mental well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people while Donald Trump was president.

“Everybody’s worst fears came into reality,” Adrienne Grzenda, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and lead author of one of the studies, said in the NBC News report. “We were noticing this undercurrent of despair and hopelessness among our clients.”

NBC reported: 

While Trump is no longer in the White House, the ongoing introduction of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the states continues to expose LGBTQ people, especially children, to the risk of significant mental health consequences, according to some advocates and researchers.

A study scheduled to be published in the December issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology found that “extreme mental distress” — defined as reporting poor mental health every day for the past 30 days — increased among LGBTQ people during Trump’s rise and presidency.

The report, written by Masanori Kuroki, an associate professor of economics at Arkansas Tech University, compared the likelihood of extreme mental distress among LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people by using data on more than 1 million people interviewed from 2014 to 2020 for the government’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. This study found that the “extreme mental distress gap” between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people “increased from 1.8 percentage points during 2014–2015 to 3.8 percentage points after Trump’s presidency became a real possibility in early 2016.” Even seemingly small increases in extreme distress are important, the study notes, because such distress is not common.

Moreover, both study authors admit they could not prove their hypothesis. According to the report:

While Kuroki’s report does include a cautionary note about attributing the increase in mental distress among LGBTQ people to the rise and presidency of Trump, he does note that ‘the findings do suggest that the Biden administration may have inherited higher rates of mental distress among LGBT people’ than they would have ‘if Trump had not run and won the 2016 election.”

As for Grzenda’s study:

“A clear association exists between the 2016 election and the changeover to a decisively anti-LGBT administration and the worsening mental health of SGM adults, although a completely causal relationship cannot be fully established,” the report, published this year in the journal LGBT Health, said.

NBC reported the study had a sample size of some 270,000 adults, approximately 5 percent of whom said they are living an LGBT lifestyle.

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