Prevalence of self-harm among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adolescents: a comparison of personal and social adversity with a heterosexual sample in Ghana

Abstract

Objectives

We sought to estimate the prevalence of self-reported self-harm among adolescents identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in Ghana, and compare self-reported personal and social adversities related to self-harm in this group to those in a random sample of heterosexual adolescents from the same locality.

Results

A total of 444 adolescents aged 13-21 years, comprising 74 LGBT adolescents and 370 heterosexual adolescents, provided data. The lifetime prevalence estimate of self-harm was higher in the LGBT group (47%) than the heterosexual group (23%). The LGBT group reported a higher rate of self-harm during the previous 12 months (45%), compared to the heterosexual group (18%). LGBT adolescents reported more alcohol and substance use and more personal social adversities, including various forms of victimisation, than heterosexual adolescents. They were no more likely to report difficulty in making and keeping friends or schoolwork problems than were heterosexual adolescents.

Metadata

Authors/Creators:	Quarshie, EN-B https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8720-2355 Waterman, MG https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0168-0426 House, AO
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2020, Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Dates:	Accepted: 25 May 2020 Published (online): 3 June 2020 Published: December 2020
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	09 Jun 2020 09:45
Last Modified:	09 Jun 2020 09:47
Status:	Published
Publisher:	BMC (Springer Nature)
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-020-05111-4

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Prevalence of self-harm among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adolescents: a comparison of personal and social adversity with a heterosexual sample in Ghana

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