These two major shifts sparked a mental health crisis among LGBTQ … – San Francisco Chronicle

Four months later, the COVID-19 pandemic began — and Ryan, like students across the country, was thrown into a new reality. He had always struggled with mental health challenges, many of which were tangled around accepting his identity. But now, away from his friends and the classroom, Ryan felt more isolated than ever. He developed an eating disorder. He spent a week in the hospital. Eventually, he dropped out of school altogether.

“A lot of my mental health struggles kind of crashed together during the pandemic,” Ryan said. “Like so many kids, I was stuck inside for so long. My mental health just collapsed.”

Today, students across California are back in the classroom. But according to two recent national surveys, the ripple effects of pandemic isolation — along with a hostile political climate — are continuing to affect youth across the state, with LGBTQ+ young people paying the highest price.

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“With all the abhorrent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it’s really hard for youth to see that and envision a life in society where you’re going to be accepted,” said Zofia Trexler, a 20-year-old youth mental health and disability rights advocate from Fresno.

By surveying nearly 223,000 students across 20 states, San Francisco organization YouthTruth found that during the 2021-22 school year, nearly 80% of bisexual, gay and lesbian middle schoolers reported depression, stress and anxiety as an obstacle to learning, double the rate of straight students.

Those disparities skyrocketed when measuring suicidal thoughts: In both middle and high schools across the country, nearly one-third of LGBTQ+ students reportedly considered suicide, compared with just 7% and 8% of their non-LGBTQ+ middle and high school peers. For transgender students, that figure is even higher: 48% of transgender middle schoolers and 41% of transgender high schoolers considered suicide, according to the YouthTruth data.

Last month, the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention organization based in West Hollywood, releasedsurvey data showing more troubling figures. Even in California, a state often considered one of the most progressive in the nation, the Trevor Project found that 44% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide during the past year, including 54% of transgender and nonbinary youth. Those responses came despite the fact that in California, 75% of LGBTQ+ youth said their own communities were accepting of LGBTQ+ people.

Ryan, now 17, wasn’t surprised by either set of data. The Concord teen, who has not only returned to school but has since become an LGBTQ+ leader there, said he has watched an increasing number of his LGBTQ+ friends struggle with their mental health since COVID-19 began — both because of pandemic isolation and because of conservative political backlash to LGBTQ+ rights.

“During the pandemic, there was a situational aspect of queer kids being stuck at home, many with unaccepting families,” Ryan said. “Some didn’t have outlets to be themselves anymore, and I think that probably impacted a lot of people.”

A mental health emergency

The findings from YouthTruth and the Trevor Project, created by those behind the 1994 short film “Trevor” about a gay 13-year-old boy who attempts to take his own life, were released at a time when youth mental health is on high alert.

In 2020, California saw a 20% spike in youth suicides across the state, according to the California Health and Human Services Agency. In 2021, public health advisories about youth mental health challenges were issued across the country. And in the spring of 2022, standardized test scores showed a six-year setback for the state’s students, creating more stress as they try to catch up with what they’ve lost.

Last summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $4.7 billion to launch the Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health, a statewide program to respond to climbing rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among California’s youth. The plan is far-reaching, including efforts to hire, train and deploy 40,000 additional mental health workers across the state, while also expanding remote access to mental health services and increasing the number of school-based counselors.

For Lishaun Francis, the director of behavioral health at Oakland advocacy organization Children Now, such programming cannot come fast enough.

Last year, Children Now, along with seven children’s hospitals and organizations, asked Newsom to declare a state of emergency for children’s mental health and fast-track new spending. In the months since, those requests were enveloped into the state’s master plan, with $50 million allocated to create a youth suicide reporting program, and $40 million to support organizations working to prevent youth suicide. While the larger master plan will be rolled out over the next three years, the first of these two programs has already been initiated, and the second will begin in early 2023.

“Young people are still struggling, and the effects of the pandemic are still looming large in their minds,” Francis said. “Young people might have experienced loss due to COVID, or financial struggles in their households. … Even though they’re back in person, many of the stressors they experienced didn’t just go away.”

One-third of California’s middle and high school students experienced serious psychological distress between 2019 and 2021, according to the California Health Interview Survey, an annual statewide survey led by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. According to experts, those stakes are higher for LGBTQ+ students, many of whom relied on spaces like school-based gay-straight alliance clubs, or sessions led by LGBTQ+ focused nonprofit organizations, to support their mental health.

That was the experience of Sasha Bucheli, another Concord teen, during the initial phases of COVID-19 lockdown. She was 14 at the time and, though she’d been in a relationship with another girl, felt she couldn’t tell her parents that her girlfriend was anything more than her best friend. Sasha was terrified that her deeply religious family would think of her as a different person.

As a result, she kept quiet, struggling to feel herself while separated from the school-based LGBTQ+ community she’d grown to depend on.

“I felt like I couldn’t share anything about myself, or tell my family anything about myself, because they wouldn’t accept me,” said Sasha, who has since come out to her parents. “It took a really big toll on me.”

Coming out in a battleground

When Ryan’s school fully reopened in August 2021, he set up a booth at his all-girls Catholic high school. Pinned to his chest was a button with a set of pronouns — he, they — that he felt most comfortable using. Set in front of him was a stack of other buttons, each with their own color and font. He stood beside a button presser, alongside markers and paper for students to make their own.

“I was so surprised by how many people took a button,” Ryan recalled. “People would grab one, and then they’d bring their friends back to get their own.”

Ryan gave out anywhere from 60 to 100 buttons that day, he said, the majority of those reading “she, her.” But almost immediately after the event, Ryan saw that conservative media outlets had picked up on it, quoting parents who were upset by the school’s support. Ryan was hoping to make his school more representative — but in the process, his work became political fodder.

“What is going on in our country, in terms of the culture wars we are experiencing, students are in the middle of that. And students are the ones who are suffering,” said Jen Vorse Wilka, the executive director of YouthTruth.

Days before Ryan spoke to The Chronicle, five people were killed at a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado. All last year, he watched as a surge of anti-LGBTQ+ laws landed throughout the country, including Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning LGBTQ+ instruction in primary schools, and multiple laws in both Tennessee and Utah banning transgender students from participating in sports. According to Casey Pick, senior fellow for advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, a record number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed in 2022: more than 228 across 39 states.

“As we anticipate another record wave of anti-LGBTQ bills in 2023, these findings underscore the critical importance that we find ways to uplift LGBTQ young people and advocate for changes that protect and support them in every state,” Pick wrote in an emailed statement.

The Bay Area has historically been known as a welcoming place for LGBTQ+ communities. Despite that, young people are not growing up in a vacuum. In California, 85% of LGBTQ+ youth reported that recent politics have negatively affected their well-being, according to the Trevor Project.

“It’s weird because in a sense, I feel like our generation is pushing us forward. But over the weekend, we were attacked — again,” said 17-year-old Maren Shahade, referring to the Nov. 19, 2022, shooting at Club Q. “Watching people in my community be targeted and oppressed and killed for who they are — that makes me depressed. That makes me really depressed, and really anxious, and really self-conscious.”

Ryan, Sasha and Maren are leaning on each other — and communities like the Rainbow Center, an LGBTQ+ nonprofit in Concord — to keep pushing forward. Each young person emphasized the impact of their schools’ gay-straight alliance clubs and how meaningful it was to have a protected space to be themselves.

“Having those types of safe spaces is so empowering because you can go and talk about your feelings with everyone else who understands them,” Sasha said. “I think that’s pretty cool — and that’s something I want for everyone who is part of the LGBTQ+ community.”

A few months after his button booth, Ryan presented a similar session at his school’s all-staff meeting. Teachers began to approach Ryan if they had a question about people’s pronouns, or if they wanted to learn more about topics related to gender identity. And a few months after that, Ryan helped organize the first Pride Prom at the Rainbow Center. It was done in partnership with PFLAG — Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, of which Ryan’s mom is treasurer.

More than 100 students attended.

The LGBTQ+ community “is one of the happiest places I have ever been,” Ryan said. “I’ve made the strongest friends, and I’ve met the strongest people. That is one of the best things.”

Elissa Miolene is a graduate of Stanford University’s journalism school and a former intern with The San Francisco Chronicle’s multimedia team. Twitter: @elissamio