By Elizabeth Hlavinka, MedPage Today, June 15, 2020
LGBTQ students attending schools with gay-straight alliance programs in place reported experiencing less bullying and better health outcomes than their LGBTQ peers whose schools lacked such programs, according to a national survey.
Among 17,112 LGBTQ high school respondents, 91% reported at least one experience with bullying of any type, and in fact most bullying was for "stigmatized identities" unrelated to gender identity or sexual orientation, such as body weight or religion, reported Leah M. Lessard, PhD, of the University of Connecticut in Hartford, and colleagues.
Although all forms of bullying were correlated with negative health outcomes like sleep issues, depression, or smoking, the presence of gay-straight alliance programs at schools, which focus on peer-to-peer connectedness to reduce prejudice, was not only associated with reductions in bullying, but improvements on these health outcomes, they wrote in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
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