{"id":3561,"date":"2017-02-20T21:33:49","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T21:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Its-really-nice-to-be-able-to-share-good-news-for-once"},"modified":"2017-02-20T21:33:49","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T21:33:49","slug":"its-really-nice-to-be-able-to-share-good-news-for-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/2017\/02\/20\/its-really-nice-to-be-able-to-share-good-news-for-once\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s really nice to be able to share good news for once."},"content":{"rendered":"        \n<p><strong>Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s really nice to be able to share <em>good<\/em> news for once. A new study in JAMA Pediatrics studied the effect of same-sex marriage laws on teen suicide rates. They looked at 32 different US states which changed their laws at different times, as a way of disentangling this effect from other effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The net result? Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to a 7% overall drop in teen suicide attempts, and a 14% drop among LGBT teens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It turns out that being publicly told that you&#8217;re an accepted member of society and not a pariah <em>does<\/em> make a difference in people&#8217;s lives, especially teenagers. Who woulda thunk?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the upshot of this is: All of you who worked on this, in one way or another? You just saved some lives. Well done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The article itself is available online: <a href=\"http:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jamapediatrics\/fullarticle\/2604258\">http:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jamapediatrics\/fullarticle\/2604258<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(NB: For clarity, that&#8217;s a 7% drop in the rate, not a seven percentage point drop drop. We should be so lucky as to have any one thing eliminate seven percentage points. As a baseline, a weighted 8.6% of all high school students, and 28.5% of LGBT high school students, attempted suicide in the year before same-sex marriage legalization. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among people aged 15-24 in the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For those who want technical notes: The paper seems to have done a very careful job on statistics, testing a wide variety of alternate hypotheses and ruling them out from the data. One test worth calling out: the two-year leading indicator (suicide rates two years prior to law changes) was <em>not<\/em> correlated to suicide rates, indicating that this was not triggered by general changes in the state which were also leading to this; the two-year trailing indicator (two years after), however, <em>was<\/em> correlated, with the same correlation as the immediate future, indicating a lasting effect rather than a one-off.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2017\/feb\/20\/drop-in-teenage-suicide-attempts-linked-to-legalisation-of-same-sex-marriage?CMP=twt_gu<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\n      ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>        It&#8217;s really nice to be able to share good news for once.<br \/>\n       <a href=\"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/2017\/02\/20\/its-really-nice-to-be-able-to-share-good-news-for-once\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[21],"tags":[94],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/mikerm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}