LGBTQ teens send a brutal message shaming political and health authorities

Stop your alarmist grandstanding scapegoating social media and face America’s very real, serious family crises victimizing teens that dominate the latest CDC survey.

A staggering 81% of the 1,200 teens under age 16 identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ+) in the Centers for Disease Control’s latest survey reported being emotionally abused, 47% violently abused, and one-third experienced other domestic violence by parents or other household adults.

This is a national emergency. Where are America’s political, mental health, and media loudmouths incessantly deploring the teenage “mental health crisis”?

Three-fourths of younger LGBTQ teens grow up with parents or household adult who abuse drugs/alcohol, are depressed/suicidal, have been jailed, are frequently absent, and/or are domestically violent – and most experienced parents with multiple problems. These are far higher proportions than for straight, heterosexual teens.

Of younger LGBTQ teens with troubled parents/adults:

·         87% report being emotionally abused by household adults,

·         55% are victimized by household adult violence,

·         60% suffer frequently poor mental health,

·         60% get fewer than 6 hours of sleep a night,

·         41% are also bullied at school,

·         33% are also cyberbullied, and

·         27% have been sexually assaulted (most by adults 5 or more years older).

Can you imagine how adult men would be acting if victimized at these levels? We’d have ten times more mass shootings.

Given authorities’ disgraceful default on this crisis, teens have to face it themselves. Most risky behaviors among adult-abused 12-15-year-old LGBTQ youth are lower than we have a right to expect:

·         51% have considered suicide,

·         29% have attempted suicide,

·         7% have harmed themselves,

·         13% get poor grades,

·         12% have taken pills,

·         6% binge drink,

·         3% carry a gun, and

·         3% have tried heroin.

Let’s look at the other side of the issue: the several hundred under-16 LGBTQ youth in the CDC survey who are suffer no, or only rare, grownup abuses:

·         26% report frequently poor mental health,

·         15% have thought about suicide,

·         6% have attempted suicide,

·         none harmed themselves,

·         20% get fewer than 6 hours of sleep,

·         14% are bullied at school,

·         10% are cyberbullied,

·         10% get poor grades,

·         4% take pills,

·         2% binge drink,

·         1% tried heroin, and

·         3% have been sexually assaulted.

Life is no picnic for many non-abused LGBTQ middle-schoolers (despite psychologist Jean Twenge’s insistence that life has gotten rosier for gay kids), either, but it’s far better than for LGBTQ youth abused by adults. One more relevant comparison:

·         80% of adult-abused under-16 LGBTQ youth use social media daily, compared to

·         62% of their non-abused counterparts.

What conclusion do America’s political and health establishments draw from the above figures? They fixate only on the last two percentages and ignore everything else. It must be smartphones, social media, and bullying peers that drive LGBTQ youths’ poor mental health and suicides. Banning under-16 ages from using screens and mandating parental consent will solve most everything.

To be fair, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy did acknowledge (buried in a 2022 report) that “76% of LGBTQ+ high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and 74% reported emotional abuse by a parent, compared with 37% and 50% of heterosexual students, respectively.” He issued a little-quoted advisory on parents’ widespread troubled and abusive behaviors toward teens, though the tone was much softer than his alarm-blaring advisories on social media and youth mental health that nowhere mentioned parents’ problems and abuses. The Centers for Disease Control’s never-quoted survey analysis linked “common” parent/adult abuses to a truly alarming 66% of teens’ sadness and 85% of their suicidal behaviors but has issued no major reports on the subject. All clearly prefer to talk only about social media and bullying kids.

Even worse is the teen/social-media panic industry led by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who insists the non-online world is wonderfully safe and refuses to admit adult abuses even exist, let alone that they’re pivotal drivers of teenagers’ depression. Or that social media is used by depressed teens to get contacts and help that deter suicidal, self-harm, and other risky behaviors.

In a Gresham’s Law of social policy, bad “culture war” crusading (easy, popular, and fun for leaders who point fingers at social-media moguls to “save the children!” and assert personal and generational superiority over powerless teens) drives out vital “family policy” discussion (difficult, unpopular, distressing, and no fun for leaders forced to examine a cherished institution and their own grownup peers). The response of America’s political and health leadership to manifest family and community crises is a disgrace that reveals far worse mental health troubles at the top than anything teens — especially LGBTQ youth — understandably manifest.