Mental Health of Black Transgender and Nonbinary Young People

Despite overall rates of suicidality among young people trending downward for the past 30 years, Black young people have experienced an increase in suicide attempts (Lindsey et al., 2019), with suicide rates among  Black young people increasing 37% between 2018 and 2021 (Stone & Mack, 2023). Due to the already existing higher rates of suicide among transgender and nonbinary young people (Johns et al., 2019), even in comparison to their cisgender lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and questioning (LGBQ) peers, the intersection of being both Black and transgender or nonbinary may make young people more susceptible to negative experiences and chronic stress stemming from their multiple marginalized social statuses (Bowleg & Bauer, 2014; Jones & Neblett, 2017). While studies have demonstrated this in samples of transgender and nonbinary young people of color (Chan et al., 2022; Vance et al., 2021), research has largely failed to explore the mental health of Black transgender and nonbinary young people. Using data from The Trevor Project's 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, this brief seeks to expand our understanding of Black young people's mental health by specifically exploring mental health indicators and protective factors among Black transgender and nonbinary young people

Troubling Vulnerability: Designing with LGBT Young People's Ambivalence Towards Hate Crime Reporting

HCI is increasingly working with ?vulnerable? people yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime they simultaneously rejected ascription as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people?s ambivalent identities and contribute insights on how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguous designed texts, alongside conventional qualitative data, we ?trouble? our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI

Frenzy: Collaborative data organization for creating conference sessions

Organizing conference sessions around themes improves the experience for attendees. However, the session creation process can be difficult and time-consuming due to the amount of expertise and effort required to consider alternative paper groupings. We present a collaborative web application called Frenzy to draw on the efforts and knowledge of an entire program committee. Frenzy comprises (a) interfaces to support large numbers of experts working collectively to create sessions, and (b) a two-stage process that decomposes the session-creation problem into meta-data elicitation and global constraint satisfaction. Meta-data elicitation involves a large group of experts working simultaneously, while global constraint satisfaction involves a smaller group that uses the meta-data to form sessions. We evaluated Frenzy with 48 people during a deployment at the CSCW 2014 program committee meeting. The session making process was much faster than the traditional process, taking 88 minutes instead of a full day. We found that meta-data elicitation was useful for session creation. Moreover, the sessions created by Frenzy were the basis of the CSCW 2014 schedule.Ford-MIT AllianceNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award SOCS-1111124)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award SOCS-1208382)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-12-1-0211)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS 1016713)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS-1110965

Troubling Vulnerability: Designing with LGBT Young People's Ambivalence Towards Hate Crime Reporting

HCI is increasingly working with ‘vulnerable’ people yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime they simultaneously rejected ascription as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people’s ambivalent identities and contribute insights on how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguous designed texts, alongside conventional qualitative data, we ‘trouble’ our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI

For Better or for Worse? A Systematic Review of the Evidence on Social Media Use and Depression Among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Minorities

Background: Over 90% of adults in the United States have at least one social media account, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons are more socially active on social media than heterosexuals. Rates of depression among LGB persons are between 1.5- and 2-fold higher than those among their heterosexual counterparts. Social media allows users to connect, interact, and express ideas, emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus, social media use might represent both a protective and a risk factor for depression among LGB persons. Studying the nature of the relationship between social media use and depression among LGB individuals is a necessary step to inform public health interventions for this population. Objective: The objective of this systematic review was to synthesize and critique the evidence on social media use and depression among LGB populations. Methods: We conducted a literature search for quantitative and qualitative studies published between January 2003 and June 2017 using 3 electronic databases. Articles were included if they were peer-reviewed, were in English, assessed social media use either quantitatively or qualitatively, measured depression, and focused on LGB populations. A minimum of two authors independently extracted data from each study using an a priori developed abstraction form. We assessed appropriate reporting of studies using the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology and the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research for quantitative and qualitative studies, respectively. Results: We included 11 articles in the review; 9 studies were quantitative and cross-sectional and 2 were qualitative. Appropriate reporting of results varied greatly. Across quantitative studies, we found heterogeneity in how social media use was defined and measured. Cyberbullying was the most studied social media experience and was associated with depression and suicidality. Qualitative studies found that while social media provides a space to disclose minority experiences and share ways to cope and get support, constant surveillance of one’s social media profile can become a stressor, potentially leading to depression. In most studies, sexual minority participants were identified inconsistently. Conclusions: This review supports the need for research on the role of social media use on depression outcomes among LBG persons. Using social media may be both a protective and a risk factor for depression among LGB individuals. Support gained via social media may buffer the impact of geographic isolation and loneliness. Negative experiences such as cyberbullying and other patterns of use may be associated with depression. Future research would benefit from more consistent definitions of both social media use and study populations. Moreover, use of larger samples and accounting for patterns of use and individuals’ experiences on social media may help better understand the factors that impact LGB mental health disparities

Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media

ABSTRACT History of mental illness is a major factor behind suicide risk and ideation. However research efforts toward characterizing and forecasting this risk is limited due to the paucity of information regarding suicide ideation, exacerbated by the stigma of mental illness. This paper fills gaps in the literature by developing a statistical methodology to infer which individuals could undergo transitions from mental health discourse to suicidal ideation. We utilize semi-anonymous support communities on Reddit as unobtrusive data sources to infer the likelihood of these shifts. We develop language and interactional measures for this purpose, as well as a propensity score matching based statistical approach. Our approach allows us to derive distinct markers of shifts to suicidal ideation. These markers can be modeled in a prediction framework to identify individuals likely to engage in suicidal ideation in the future. We discuss societal and ethical implications of this research

Three Papers Exploring Substance Use in Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

Disparities between the substance use rates of sexual or gender minority (SGM) youth and the rates of youth identifying as heterosexual (i.e., attracted to the opposite sex) and cisgender (i.e., gender identity corresponds to birth sex) have given rise to calls for 1) research to understand the specific risk and protective factors relating to substance use in SGM youth and 2) the development of corresponding intervention programming In three papers, this dissertation explores predictors for substance use among SGM youth and describes methods of targeted recruitment for a prevention intervention program tailored to SGM youth. In the first paper, comparing the contributing factors of substance use between sexual minority and heterosexual youth revealed that although many predictors were associated with use in both groups, sadness, suicidal ideation, difficulty concentrating, and forced sexual encounters were the most consistent and substantial contributors to the explanation of the difference in use rates between groups. In the second paper, risk and protective factors identified from social learning theory and minority stress theory, including perceived stress, problem-solving skills, self-esteem, self-efficacy, substance refusal skills, and peer use of substance, were generally associated with past-month substance use. Peer use of substance and substance refusal skills, in particular, were consistently and robustly associated with substance use in the sample of SGM youth, and their intersection provides insight into themes to address in future intervention development. Issues of disclosure and parental permission have made recruiting representative samples of SGM youth challenging, and the third paper offers insight into an inexpensive and time-efficient means of recruiting SGM youth for participation in such research. The specificity with which Facebook ads can be targeted to hard-to-reach populations makes it a preferred tool for researchers who seek to recruit SGM youth. Taken together, the three papers of this dissertation can serve as a guide for the development and execution of substance use prevention research that is tailored to the specific needs of SGM youth

A Study of User Behaviors and Activities on Online Mental Health Communities

abstract: Social media is a medium that contains rich information which has been shared by many users every second every day. This information can be utilized for various outcomes such as understanding user behaviors, learning the effect of social media on a community, and developing a decision-making system based on the information available. With the growing popularity of social networking sites, people can freely express their opinions and feelings which results in a tremendous amount of user-generated data. The rich amount of social media data has opened the path for researchers to study and understand the users’ behaviors and mental health conditions. Several studies have shown that social media provides a means to capture an individual state of mind. Given the social media data and related work in this field, this work studies the scope of users’ discussion among online mental health communities. In the first part of this dissertation, this work focuses on the role of social media on mental health among sexual abuse community. It employs natural language processing techniques to extract topics of responses, examine how diverse these topics are to answer research questions such as whether responses are limited to emotional support; if not, what other topics are; what the diversity of topics manifests; how online response differs from traditional response found in a physical world. To answer these questions, this work extracts Reddit posts on rape to understand the nature of user responses for this stigmatized topic. In the second part of this dissertation, this work expands to a broader range of online communities. In particular, it investigates the potential roles of social media on mental health among five major communities, i.e., trauma and abuse community, psychosis and anxiety community, compulsive disorders community, coping and therapy community, and mood disorders community. This work studies how people interact with each other in each of these communities and what these online forums provide a resource to users who seek help. To understand users’ behaviors, this work extracts Reddit posts on 52 related subcommunities and analyzes the linguistic behavior of each community. Experiments in this dissertation show that Reddit is a good medium for users with mental health issues to find related helpful resources. Another interesting observation is an interesting topic cluster from users’ posts which shows that discussion and communication among users help individuals to find proper resources for their problem. Moreover, results show that the anonymity of users in Reddit allows them to have discussions about different topics beyond social support such as financial and religious support.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201