China’s LGBT community five times more likely to develop mental illness and consider suicide than general public, report finds
- Factors affecting the mental health of LGBT people include loneliness, work, marital pressure, STIs, and coming out
- Transgender people face identity anxiety, a lack of social support and martial pressure
The Chinese Gender and Sexual Minorities Psychological Health Survey was conducted by the Beijing LGBT Centre and experts at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and released on Thursday. It was based on 9,355 collected questionnaires, with an average age of 22.
It found that 59 per cent of those surveyed are prone to different levels of depression. While 54 per cent have thought about suicide within the past year, 13.1 per cent thought about suicide in the past week. Compared with a 2019 study that found 12 per cent of the general public in China had suicidal thoughts, the rates among gender and sexual minorities were much higher, the report said.
Compared with the general public, the risk for getting depression is two to four times higher for LGBT people under 18, and two to five times higher for adults, the report found.
Factors that could affect the psychological health of LGBT people include loneliness, employment, marital pressures, sexually transmitted diseases and coming out of the closet.