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Friday, January 22, 2016

Odd

I am researching Social Dysfunction in the LGBT community, and one of the standard explanations is that homophobia causes these problems.  I have my own theory, but this paper startled me:

Overall, LGB individuals were more likely to have received treatment for mental health diagnoses and to have used anti-depressant medication compared to heterosexuals. The largest disparities were found for mood disorders among men (odds ratio [OR] for sexual orientation disparity: 3.66, 95% CI: 1.98-6.78), and substance-related disorders among women (OR for sexual orientation disparity: 4.45, 95% CI: 2.17-9.13).  Disparities in treatment for mental diagnoses were largest among adolescents and young adults, and decreased with increasing age; no sexual orientation disparities were found in the oldest age group (65 years and older). However, use of anti-depressants was consistently more than twice as common among gay and bisexual men, from early adulthood (30-44 years) and older, as compared to heterosexual men.
So did gay Swedes born before 1949 grow up in a less homophobic society than the ones born after 1980?

3 comments:

  1. They call it effect measure modification by age, but I wonder if there is not some interfering factor or sampling bias. The pre-49 cohort would have been all at least 26 years of age by the point when homosexuality was both politically accepted and no-longer considered a mental-illness by the medical community.

    Although this might be an indication that the homophobia hypothesis is true -- most young-people pre 1980's were encouraged to hide non-normal expressions, after the 1977 revision of Sweden's national sex-ed curriculum youth were encouraged to be "out" -- and thus more exposed to both real and perceived abuse because their youthful peers are now aware that they are non-hetero. Young people are far more mean to each other in social interactions, most full adults make some effort to be polite or at least non-confrontational when interacting with others and not inebriated.

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  2. It is hard to draw any conclusions from those results. There are just too many variables not addressed.

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  3. If it's hard to draw any conclusions from the results, then we know that neither the answer "more homophobia" nor the answer "less homophobia" fits the available data.

    I know which answer would typically be given if the numbers were reversed, even if the same caveats applied with respect to the number of variables.

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