Critique 2 research papers - Essay Example

It has been my opinion that the lesbian, gay and bisexual populations likely suffer from a greater level of depression and other mental health disorders because of their position in society. Society has a dim view of this, because for many people homosexuality is seen as either wrong, or the people who have this sexuality are ill. Article Choice The strategy that I used in the discovery of these two articles was very decisive and simple. I was searching through my university’s online library database, EBCOHOST, using search terms of ‘mental health gay’, ‘mental health lesbian‘, ‘mental health bisexual’ and ‘suicide’ in the same contexts.

I found a plethora of articles, so I did some skimming of each one to find the two that I would like to use for this paper. Upon further reading of each article, I was especially intrigued by these two because they two claimed to be the first of their kind, given the body of research that the authors of these articles were aware of. This piqued my interest further, and found within them many similarities in the methodology of the analyses, which will be discussed. They both covered within limitations the differences of age, gender and race within their samples.

The findings of each article had some discrepancies, but also had certain key points that were similar. Critical Summation First, I am going to explore the article written by Brian S. Mustanski, et al. In this article, it is put forth that among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth aged 16 to 20 years in Chicago, the prevalence of a mental health disorder is higher than that of heterosexual youth. Other sample studies have shown few LGB identified respondents, due to the combining of disproportionate representation.

This allows for major inconsistencies in the study and findings previous concerning the gender differences and the individual’s sexual orientation. Most studies that are similar in nature also did not allow for transgender participants. This understudied population was found in one small study to have an elevated level of substance abuse and victimization, but there was little to no evidence to support findings of higher than normal depression levels. There are many theories that warrant mental health disparities among LGB youth, namely minority stress.

This theory simply states that racial or ethnical minorities are more likely to have a mental disorder resulting from prejudicial discrimination from their communities. This assessment covered posttraumatic stress disorder, anorexia, bulimia, depression, conduct disorder and suicidality. In a sampling of 246 youth with ethnic diversity were used in this study to prove this hypothesis. Using the DSM-IV via the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC, Shaffer et al., 2000) allowed the researchers to use strictly specific diagnoses among the adolescent sample group.

Along with the DSM-IV and DISC, this study used the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI 18, Derogatis, 2000) to measure the levels of psychological stress within the prior week. In testing of the hypotheses in reference to demographic differences, anorexia and bulimia were excluded. Another group, non-LGB, were used as a model to avoid further discrepancy. It was found that racial or et