Review articleSuicidality and Depression Disparities Between Sexual Minority and Heterosexual Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review
Section snippets
Methods
Meta-analysis reporting guidelines [23] developed and recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were followed closely for this study.
Suicidality
The literature search yielded 20 suicidality studies with 122 corresponding effect size estimates. Studies reported multiple effect size estimates because of having multiple outcome variables, multiple demographic subgroups, or both. One effect size was over five standard deviations larger than the overall weighted effect size [29], and thus was excluded from the analyses. Furthermore, 16 of the original 122 effects were redundant with other effects within the individual studies (e.g., some
Discussion
This study provides strong evidence that SMY experience significantly higher levels of suicidality and depression symptoms than heterosexual youth. The robust pattern of results, particularly regarding suicidality, highlights the severity and pervasiveness of disparities between SMY and heterosexual youth. For example, on average 28% of SMY reported a history of suicidality as compared with 12% of heterosexual youth. Second, 104 of the 105 individual ORs for the association between sexual
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