GEEKERY  
ADVENTURE  
CONTEMPLATION  

20160125

Suicides and "The Policy"

For those of you who aren't aware, the LDS church instituted a policy regarding LGBT families back in November. One of the major criticisms of this policy is it could potentially increase the suicide rate of LGBT Mormons. And recently, some numbers have been thrown around about the number of LGBT Mormon suicides since the policy was instituted.  I haven't fact-checked these, but as of January 23, the numbers I've seen were around 32.

I don't understand the policy, and I don't particularly want to defend it, but I do believe in statistics. The number of suicides alone is not enough to say that the policy has caused any change in suicidal behavior. We need to compare to the number of LGBT Mormons who would have done the same if there were no new policy announced.

We can't actually know what would have happened, but we can estimate it.  Ideally, we'd have data on LDS LGBT suicides rates, but I couldn't find anything quantitative.  So let's assume that most of these cases are Americans, and the average suicide rate in the US is 0.0211% per year, or 0.00451% of the population in the same 78 day period. The church reports around 6,466,267 members in the United States. This means that, if Mormons are typical in their suicide rate (which they seem not to be), there should be around 285 Mormon suicides in that same time period. Around 3.4% of the adult population identify as LGBT, so that takes the estimate down to about 10 suicides.

All these numbers come from Wikipedia, so I'm using questionable sources, but I didn't want to put too much time into this. But with this very loose estimate of suicide rate, it seems there would be a tragic increasea 220% increase.  That seems a little too large to be believable to me.

We could mirror stats on Jewish LGBT youth to help account for the fact that LGBT folks in religious communities are more likely to attempt suicide.  Along these lines, if we assume there are 219,853 LGBT Mormons and that they are four times more likely to commit suicide than national average, that would put our estimate closer to 40 suicides in the same time rangethis would mean that there was actually a decrease in the suicide rate since the policy was enacted.  This may not be as surprising as it sounds, since there was significant backlash against the policy, so LGBT Mormons may have actually received a surge of support from friends and family.

The point I'm trying to make is that it is very, very difficult to make any causal attributions in this case (or in general).  Suicide is incredibly sad regardless of cause, and I also mourn that any person could feel rejected by their religion.  We must take steps to help prevent suicide, and we must be loving and welcoming members of our respective communities.  But part of knowing what steps to take is to get real data on what's happening, not just jumping to the worst conclusions.  Big changes require strong evidence.  And probably lots of hugs in the meanwhile.

1 comment:

ajbc said...

Very relevant post:

http://rationalfaiths.com/the-lgbtq-mormon-crisis-responding-to-the-empirical-research-on-suicide/