Study Shows Trump Presidency Correlates with Worsened LGBTQ Mental Health

As a community, many American LGBTQ people can speak to the negative mental health outcomes that emerged throughout the Trump presidency. Now, that collective strife has data to back it.

A new study, published in the journal of Economics & Human Biology, surveyed 1.06 million Americans through the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), asking respondents how many days during the past 30 they considered their mental health to be “not good.” Those who responded with all 30 days are considered to have experienced “extreme mental distress.”

The study found that LGBTQ-identifying respondents experienced a greater increase in extreme mental distress over non-LGBTQ respondents.

Before Trump’s presidency in 2014, 7.7 percent of LGBTQ respondents and 4.8 percent of non-LGBTQ respondents reported extreme mental distress. Those numbers shot up notably by 2019, three years into the Trump presidency, with 12 percent of LGBTQ respondents reporting extreme mental distress, compared to the slight increase up to 5 percent for non-LGBTQ people.

The study notes that increases were higher for LGBTQ people who lived in red states that voted for Trump, in comparison to LGBTQ people living in blue states that predominantly voted democrat in the 2016 election.

The study’s author Masanori Kuroki, an associate professor of economics at Arkansas Tech University, told PsyPost the findings suggest that, “the Trump administration possibly adversely affected mental health among LGBT people.”

The BRFSS acquires a new sample every year, and it doesn’t question the same individuals over time, according to PsyPost, which limits the ability of researchers to draw too many definitive conclusions from the survey.

“The finding is not causal, and we cannot confidently attribute the rise in mental distress among LGBT to Trump or his administration,” Kuroki says.

The research brings to question what other factors might cause this sort of response from LGBTQ people, like the recent U.S. Census data newly released which indicates economic disparity toward LGBTQ people in the U.S. through the pandemic.

Though, the study’s findings align with other reports that indicated increased mental distress from the Trump presidency, including a quadruple-rate increase in suicide hotline calls to the Trans Lifeline following Trump’s attacks on the trans community, the spike in trans teen suicide attempts, and a study showing that there were higher rates of bullying in areas that favored Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

While we can take solace in the fact that Trump is now out of the White House, the effects of his presidency and the harmful rhetoric that emerged from his administration still undoubtedly weigh on and affect LGBTQ people in the United States.