Bisexual teens at greater suicide risk

The "It Gets Better" Project was launched in 2010 for addressing suicides amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual teens by recording online reminders that their lives are going to improve as they leave school and transition into adulthood.

The new study finds that this is not necessarily the case for bisexual teens and that a more nuanced approach to counseling might help.

Past studies have reported that gay and lesbian teens have more symptoms of depression than heterosexual teens. Lead researcher Robert Cardom of the department of educational, school, and counseling psychology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and his colleagues set out to find whether depression decreased as the teens aged.

Teens were divided into groups based on their self-reported identification as heterosexual, mostly heterosexual, gay, mostly gay or bisexual.

The study found that depression symptoms, namely thoughts of suicide, decreased from 42 percent to 12.3 percent as teens in all groups transitioned into adulthood and suicide attempts decreased from 15.9 to 2.9 percent. But the "mostly gay" and bisexual teens did not report a significant decrease in some measures of suicidal thoughts or behaviors.

The new study has been published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.