Background: Minority stress may lead to poorer mental health for sexual and gender minority adolescents, yet no interventions have been tested through an RCT to address these concerns. Methods: We report on an RCT of an intervention—Proud & Empowered—with four high schools. Measures assess the intervention’s impact on mental health symptoms. Results: Compared to the control, participants in the treatment condition reported significant differences in minority stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. Moderation analyses showed that the intervention significantly moderated the relationship between minority stress and PTSD (b = -1.28, p = .032), depression (b = -0.79, p = .023), and suicidality (b = 0.14, p = .012) symptoms; those in the intervention condition had mitigated relationships between measures of stress and health outcomes compared to those in the control condition. Conclusions: Results suggest that Proud & Empowered help reduce mental health symptoms and exposure to minority stressors and build coping strategies. Trial Registration: The intervention was registered on clinicaltrials.gov on August 1, 2019 under Trial #NCT04041414.

This paper aimed to examine the association between digital sexual violence (threat to post or nonconsensual posting of sexually explicit media) and suicidal (ideation, planning, and attempt) and non-suicidal self-harm behavior. The data for the current analysis come from an online sample of sexual minority adolescents (aged 14–17) recruited from across the United States ( n = 970). Multivariate logistic regressions were used to examine the association between digital sexual violence with suicide (ideation, planning, and attempt) and self-harm. In the sample, 9.1% of participants reported being threatened to have their sexually explicit media posted without their consent, while 6.5% reported their sexually explicit media had been posted without their consent. Threat to post sexually explicit media without consent was associated with higher odds of reporting suicidal ideation (odds ratio [OR] = 1.88), suicide plan (OR = 2.12), suicide attempt (OR = 3.56), and self-harm (OR = 1.96). While nonconsensual posting of sexually explicit media was associated with higher odds of reporting suicidal ideation (OR = 1.82) and suicide attempt (OR = 2.20). All models controlled for age, assigned sex at birth, sexual identity, and race and ethnicity. These findings underscore important considerations and future research directions. Given the associations between digital sexual violence and suicide risk among sexual minority adolescents, suicide prevention efforts with adolescents must be responsive to the needs of sexual minority adolescents and the changing landscape of sexual violence in digital spaces. Future research should examine the trajectories of digital sexual violence among adolescents and comparative analyses by demographic subgroups to better understand changes in these processes over time.

The current study examined suicide-related disclosure intentions in LGBTQ + youth, and the associations between reporting of lifetime experiences of minority stress and intentions to disclose suici...

The purpose of the current study was to determine if, and how, Hispanic adolescents receiving clinical treatment differ from their peers who are not in treatment on the 8 domains (family economic stress, cultural or educational stress, acculturation-gap stress, immigration stress, discrimination stress, family immigration stress, community or gang-related stress) of cultural stress (HSI-A), and if the relation between cultural stress domains and depressive symptomology differed by group membership (clinical vs. nonclinical). The sample included 1,254 Hispanic adolescents. The clinical sample had significantly higher scores of cultural stress (p < .05) and mean depression scores (< .001). All 8 domains of HSI-A stress were correlated with depression (p < .05). In the general linear models (GLM), only family economic, acculturation gap, family immigration, discrimination, and family drug stress had a unique effect on depression and effect varied by group. Acculturation gap stress was associated with depression for the nonclinical group but not the clinical group (p < .001) and community gang stress was more strongly related to depression for the clinical group (p < .05).