Maggie O’Neill

Dr. Daigle

FYOS

9 October 2019

Today I will be reflecting on Article 1 because I feel deeply connected to its topics. The

reason why I originally wanted to take this class was so that I could learn how to better

understand and help my friends and myself with thoughts and feelings that I feel so often plague

my generation. This article in particular really stuck out to me because I have participated in

musical theatre for all of my life and have therefore made friends with a lot of kids who struggle

with their identity and more specifically, their sexuality. Many of these friends have expressed to

me that they have experienced periods of depression and suicidal ideation, and it has always

made me feel incredibly sad and helpless to do anything; as someone who identifies as straight in

our heteronormative society, I will never understand the struggles that my LGBTQ+ friends go

through on a daily basis with accepting themselves and having others accept them. It is so

difficult to comprehend how it feels to be an outcast in society or like you aren’t accepted; I,

personally, am a people pleaser, and I think it would drive me just about crazy if my mere

existence made people hate me. The fact that there is a 16% difference in the amount of sexual

minority youths and heterosexual youths who have history with suicidality is disturbing and

indicative of the fact that there needs to more support in place, like the amazing organization The

Trevor Project, to help youths in the sexual minority who struggle with thoughts of suicide.

After reading this article, I also have more of an understanding of how people in the

sexual minority who are also ethnically diverse can struggle even more with their mental health,

seeing as they can feel marginalized due to multiple facets of their being. It was fascinating to
see the results of the study and find out which particular ethnicities in the sexual minority were

more prone to suicidal ideation and actual suicide attempts. I was surprised that Asian and Black

youths had a lower risk of depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, and other outcomes than

white youths. I understand that this is because of a lot of culture’s concepts of suicide. For

example, a lot of Christian communities see suicide as extremely sinful. I would still have

expected, however, for the white population to be the least at risk for suicide out of all the

ethnicities. This is probably due to an assumption on my part that since white people are not

marginalized in our society, they would feel less of a sense of marginalization and

discrimination.

I think that a sense of belonging is really important to one’s mental health, and a feeling

of lack of belonging can be a great contributor to feelings of depression and thoughts of suicide.

Thinking that there is no one or nowhere you belong, in my experience, can often lead to

thoughts that no one would care if you were gone. These kinds of dangerous thoughts are what

sadly lead to others taking their own lives. A gay boy in my sister’s BFA Musical Theatre

program committed suicide last Fall, feeling that he did not belong because he was gay and that

nobody cared about him. It ripped my sister and the rest of her classmates apart because they had

no idea that he was feeling that way. I often wonder if they could have saved him if they had

known he was having these feelings and gotten him the help he needed. For this reason, I think it

is extremely important for people to take these kinds of Mental Health First Aid classes, so that

people can be aware of signs and symptoms to look for in a person struggling with mental

illness. There is enough tragedy in the world that it seems truly unfathomable for parents to be

left childless and siblings to lose their best friends to something like suicide. Thank you for

offering this course.