Making Up Gay Youth Suicides as We Go Along
Waidzunas, T (2011). Young, Gay, and Suicidal: Dynamic Nominalism and the Process of Defining a Social Problem with Statistics, Science, Technology & Human Values
[Click here for abstract]
How does something come to be true? Because it really is true or individually or collectively we choose to believe that it is? Your perception, as I might have suggested previously on this blog, can suffice for your reality. In that regard, whenever I read some bunged-up statistics claiming that pewfs in general and young pewfs in particular are topping themselves with gay abandon, I am immediately compelled to ask: why would anyone tell such monstrous lies?
What end could they be seeking to achieve?
Perhaps, as Waidzunas (2011, n.pag.) suggests, such blatant dishonesty can start out rather naively and with good intentions. In some detail, he recalls how a 1998 article in Rolling Stone magazine served to solidify the myth that gay youth in the United States were exponentially more likely to kill themselves than their straight counterparts. The desired purpose of that article was to raise public awareness about the health and wellbeing issues that gay youth faced.
Over time, the dodgy evidence upon which the aforementioned article was based became, as Waidzunas (2011) quaintly puts it, ‘black boxed’ from scrutiny. No one bothered or even seemed to care to critically analyse the grandiose and ever burgeoning claim that gay youth were so much more likely to plunge off the perch than straight youth were and ultimately, that uncontested claim morphed into a sacred truth (Waidzunas, 2011). Both gay lovers and gay haters alike shared the fantastic view that…
Gay youth are suicidal bombshells (Waidzunas, 2011)…
So why does it matter, then?
Well, I would agree with Waidzunas (2011) that this myth…
- creates the false impression that to be suicidal is a ‘normal’ and expected part of life for gay youth;
- emboldens the dangerous scientific endeavour of conflating homosexuality with psychopathology; and
- obscures the ‘real’ issues that confront gay youth in their specific socio-cultural milieu.
‘…according to an increasingly universal discourse found in many scientific documents and media reporting, all gay youth are equally at increased risk for suicide, regardless of level of family acceptance, school climate, sex, race, class, nation, region, or any other imaginable variable. The erasure of difference in the attribution of risk leads to the depiction of youth in very different circumstances as equally at risk, effectively ‘homogenizing’ the category ‘gay youth.’ This glosses over the complexity of human lives by lumping many people into one category represented by a single number (cf. Porter 1995, 84-86), while it also facilitates the commensuration of diverse life experiences by applying a common metric of suicide risk (Espeland and Mitchell, 2008)’ (Waidzunas, 2011).
Contrary to all this pernicious rabble and citing Savin-Williams (2005), Waidzunas (2011) contends that gay youth can rebel against their pre-determined ‘suicidal script’ and can instead demonstrate immense resilience. We are now perhaps in a liminal phase regarding this matter, a period of heightened ruction whereby the expectation that young pewfs will check out willy-nilly is slowly but surely being replaced by a definitive ‘fuck you, will I!’
The string left hanging here is that bucket full of lies called the ‘suicide prevention industry’, and its addiction to making up stories to serve its own nefarious ends…
See also:
This scathing piece by Melissa Raven, which berates the truth-handling abilities of the many monkey gland salespeople, who nowadays constitute the bulk of the broader, mental health industry…
I’m confused now:
http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/gay-teens-at-increased-risk-of-suicide/
““We conducted a meta-analysis, which means we combined the results of 18 studies involving more than 100 different comparisons and over 100,000 teenage participants, and we were surprised by the overwhelming consistency of the results,” says Michael P. Marshal, assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh.
(…)
The studies also show that even after controlling for variables such as depression, low self-esteem, substance use, and conflict with family, gay and lesbian youth were still more than twice as likely to report a history of suicidality as heterosexual youth.”
Are you/Waidzunas wrong? Or is the analysis only about attempts (maybe brought on by the identity of ‘suicidal gay youth’)? Or something completely different…?
I sincerely appreciate ultimo167’s blog post about my article, “Young, Gay, and Suicidal: Dynamic Nominalism and the Process of Defining a Social Problem with Statistics,” forthcoming in Science, Technology, and Human Values. While ultimo167 has advanced some of my main points accurately, I feel it is my responsibility to correct some ways in which I feel that this post has misrepresented parts of my argument. First and foremost, my paper does not claim that increased suicide risk for gay teens is a “monstrous lie,” a “myth,” or a form of “blatant dishonesty.” While I point out various complexities and ironies about suicide prevention in the paper, I do not consider suicide prevention to be a “bucketful of lies” that is making up stories for “nefarious ends.” Rather, I go to great pains to explain how increased risk of suicide attempts has been replicated scientifically, even as it has been challenged, and how the project of demonstrating suicide risk has made significant contributions to institutions and scientific knowledge.
Ultimo167’s position in this blog is much like one taken up by several scholars interested in debunking what they claim are “false” and deceptive statistics. By contrast, my paper is written from the field of science studies, utilizing Ian Hacking’s concept of “dynamic nominalism” to argue that interactive relationships between statistical representations and humans represented are inevitable and not unusual. Furthermore, in the United States where there is a strong propensity to put faith in statistical information in contentious policy debates, gay teen suicide statistics were perhaps the only way in which the unmet needs of young gay people could come to the fore in this culture. Now that gay teen suicide estimates and subsequent replications in scientific research have done important and vital work, it is possible to consider some ironies. While ultimo167 has captured some of these ironies—the homogenization of “gay youth” as a category, the narrowing of ways in which gay youth can be culturally conceptualized—he has overstated my position. In my paper I warn, “If the [resilience] perspective were to become oversimplified and dominant, it could lead to some gay youth downplaying the reality of stressors in their lives, enacting a ‘resilience script.’ While the resilience perspective is important for conceptualizing how gay teenhood can actually be a time of empowerment, growth, and normalcy, it also has the potential to homogenize the category ‘gay youth’ as only an experience of invincibility and self-determination” (Waidzunas 2011, n.pag.).
To conclude, my article is not about “Making up gay teen suicides as we go along,” but rather, it is about making up the category “gay youth” as one that has primarily been conceived as linked to suicidality, pathology, and little else. I think that ultimo167 and I share the position that many queer youth are admirably resilient, and truly neither of us wish to erase the realities of tragedy and suffering. The revised version of my abstract, available as “version 2” of the paper currently online and available in the final version that will be in the journal, clarifies that one of the original gay teen suicide statistical estimates from the US Department of Health and Human Services has indeed been replicated scientifically. I am grateful to ultimo167 for his blog post, especially as it made me realize this need for clarification, and I am grateful to the editors of Science, Technology, and Human Values for allowing me to slightly modify the abstract.
Just to (re)-state a few facts…
1. The predictive capacity of suicide risk assessment is zero, in that you cannot accurately determine which particular individual will kill her or himself on the basis of any predetermined risk or aggregate set of risk factors. Suicide is a statistically uncommon phenomenon that is derived from multiple causative factors, factors that vary from subject person to subject person.
2. There is an unpleasant tendency by researchers, whether or not they be funded by big pharma, to latch onto the normative (and unproven) concept that completed suicides indicate a preceding mental illness, or mental illnesses. The reality is that a) no accurate information exists to make such a sweeping generalisation and b) the existence of mental illness in a subject person who ultimately commits suicide cannot necessarily lead to the conclusion that the former led to the latter.
3. Any discussion about suicidal ideation should be conducted knowing that suicidal ideation is to completed suicides what Donald Trump is to truth-telling. Moreover, dodgy research design (see this set of surveys by MindOUT, http://www.lgbthealth.org.au/mindout, as an example) can encourage, coerce or cajole respondents into producing expected results, such as that much ramped-up nonsense that (young) gay men are on the edge and climbing hard.
4. Research is not objective. It is created in the social world and intricately interwoven with cultural, ideological, political, economic and other pertinent considerations. In that regard, the push to marry fags to madness (if not to each other) continues apace and for those of us who see the dangers in that approach, the imperative is to counter all that bunk with accurate, hard evidence. I note here that even when ‘context’ is thrown into this nasty mix, it usually stretches no further than to allow vulnerable pewf to succumb to her or his underlying psychopathology, under pressure.
Cheers,
Stephen
The revised version of my abstract is available here.