Laws that deny services to same-sex couples might be harming their mental health. Experts from the Boston University School of Public Health learned in an observational study that this denial to the LGBTQ community could actually cause an increase in mental distress.
Experts apparently noticed a significant increase in reports about mental distress coming from the sexual minority or LGBT groups from 2014 to 2016. They published their findings in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
Around this time, three states -- Michigan, North Carolina and Utah -- passed laws that removed services to same-sex couples, such as marriage or the adoption of children and allowed agencies to reject same-sex couples on the basis of religious freedom.
Study experts looked into the data of 109,089 adults in nine states in both heterosexual and sexual minority groups. They also compared the data of 37,514 adults from Michigan, North Carolina and Utah against the data of individual respondents from control states like Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.
Experts learned that 23 percent of respondents who identified as LGBTQ reported mental distress in 2014, while only 12.5 percent of the heterosexual respondents had such problems.
Two years later when the same-sex laws were implemented in these three states, the number of LGBTQ adults with reported mental distress climbed by at least 10.1 percent. Heterosexual adults who reported mental distress in the three states, on the other hand, only rose by about 0.8 percent.
"We are at a turning point with laws permitting the denial of services to same-sex couples in the United States," study author Julia Raifman said in a press release. "This study provides evidence that laws permitting the denial of services to same-sex couples harm the health of sexual minority adults—without benefiting the health of heterosexual adults."
