Bullying and Unsupportive Laws Linked to Rising Mental Health Symptoms in Gender-Diverse Teens

Overview

• UCLA Health researchers report in JAMA Network Open that gender-diverse adolescents facing bullying and living under persistently unsupportive gender-identity laws show greater and growing distress on a key mental-health screen.
• Psychotic-like experiences, the study’s focus, include feelings like unusual suspiciousness or hearing sounds others do not, and they signal elevated risk for later disorders if left unaddressed.
• The analysis drew on the national ABCD Study, using a cross-sectional sample of 8,463 youths and a four-year follow-up of about 4,200 participants across five waves from 2017 to 2022.
• Gender-diverse youths reported more bullying and more psychotic-like experiences than peers, and bullying statistically explained about 18% of that difference.
• Teens in states classified by the Movement Advance Project as persistently unsupportive showed larger increases in these symptoms over time, which the authors say underscores the need for clinician screening of social stressors and awareness of policy effects; the work was funded by NINDS and NIMH.