Study finds higher rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts among transgender adults

May 4 2017

Suicidal thoughts and attempts by adult transgender individuals were 14 and 22 times higher, respectively, than rates for the general public, according to a new study published in Transgender Health, a peer-reviewed open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available open access on the Transgender Health website.

In a meta-synthesis of the transgender suicidality literature that included 42 studies published over 19 years, coauthors Noah Adams, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Maaya Hitomi, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, and Cherie Moody, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, reported differences in the rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts between male-to-female and female-to-male transgender respondents and gender non-conforming individuals. Their findings, presented in the article "Varied Reports of Adult Transgender Suicidality: Synthesizing and Describing the Peer Reviewed and Grey Literature," can help target interventions aimed at suicide protection and support for these at-risk populations.

"Suicidality and other forms of mental health distress are health disparities that increasingly are being documented and studied in the academic literature as disproportionately affecting transgender people and populations," says Editor-in-Chief Robert Garofalo MD, MPH, Professor of Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Director, Center for Gender, Sexuality and HIV Prevention, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. "With this work, Noah Adams and colleagues advance the field by conducting a meta-analysis giving important epidemiologic data that can then be used to develop interventions designed to help transgender people who are having suicidal thoughts or are experiencing psychological distress."​