[{"_1":2,"_30":-5,"_31":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4},"routes/__layout/tag.$name",{"_5":6,"_7":8},"tagName","teen suicide","posts",[9],{"_10":11,"_12":13,"_14":15,"_16":17,"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":23,"_24":-5,"_25":-5,"_26":27,"_28":29},"id",1433,"title","Three gay teens kill themselves every day","excerpt","The recent string of gay teen suicides is heartbreaking, but it's not a sudden surge. Three gay teenagers kill themselves every day in America. For every name you've heard this week, there are eighteen more you haven't. This is an ongoing crisis, not a news cycle.","body","

The twittersphere and blogs have been alight this week with a string of high-profile suicides by gay (or perceived to be gay) teenagers, starting with Billy Lucas, who was 15. Then there was Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old who hung himself and was taken off life support after ten days. Then Asher Brown, another 13-year-old, shot himself in the head. Then 18-year-old Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge after fellow students broadcast video of him having sex on the internet. And on Wednesday Raymond Chase, a 19 year old, hung himself.\n\n

Their deaths are unbearably sad, and deserve all the attention they've been getting, and all the hand-wringing about teen suicide, and gay teen suicide in particular. I encourage you to check out Dan Savage's It Gets Better project, and watch Ellen's plea to end bullying. But we need to be clear: this is not a sudden surge in gay teen suicides. This isn't even a complete list of the gay teen suicides that happened in September. For that, we'd need nearly a hundred names.\n\n

Between 4,000 and 5,000 teenagers kill themselves every year in America[1],[2]. That's between 11 and 13 teens killing themselves every single day. gay teenagers are four times more likely to commit suicide than straight teenagers, which means about 3 gay teenagers are killing themselves every day, about 95 every month[3].\n\n

So mourn these kids, all the potential they had that we've lost. But remember the scale of the problem we're dealing with: for every one of these, there are eighteen more we didn't hear about, just in September.\n\n

\n\n

[3] About 26% of teen suicides are gay teens. This assumes gay teenagers are about 8% of the population, which is a very hard statistic to nail down.

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Posts tagged “teen suicide”