1 - (SYM 129) Empowerment Moderates Risk for Suicide Among SGM Young Adults

Substantial evidence documents that individuals of a sexual or gender minority (SGM) are at higher risk for suicide attempts and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI; Horowitz et al., 2020) due to elevated exposure to minority stressors such as stigma, prejudice, and discrimination (Meyer, 2033). The prevalence of discriminatory experiences among SGM young adults (Busby et al., 2020) underscores the importance of examining factors that may buffer the negative impact of these minority stressors. Empowerment beliefs are associated with coping, resilience, and reduced depression or anxiety (Poteat et al., 2020), and may protect against the negative effects of discriminatory experiences. A recent study found that increasing empowerment among sexual minority women resulted in reduced suicidality, anxiety, depression, and internalized negative SGM identity elements (Pachanskis et al., 2020). The current project tested a model specifying empowerment as a moderator of the pathways from discriminatory experiences to past year NSSI and suicide attempts.

Participants included 328 LGBTQ university students (M_age = 20.02, SD = 1.9; 29.3% Bisexual, 23.5% Questioning, 11.6% Lesbian, 9.8% Gay, 25.8% other sexual orientation; 18.6% TGNB; 83.8% White) recruited through the Psychology Department’s SONA system. Approximately 70% of the sample reported NSSI in the past year (M_freq = 7.55, SD = 8.25) and 8.5% (n = 28) reported attempting suicide in the past year. A moderated mediational regression analysis with 5,000 bootstrapped bias corrected samples was run using the PROCESS macro for SPSS (model 59; Hayes, 2022). The full model was significant, F (5,322) = 24.71, p< .001, accounting for 27.73% of the variance in past year attempts. All three interactions were significant and the conditional indirect effect of discriminatory experiences on attempts through NSSI was significant at low (95% CI: 0.001; 0.08) and average levels of empowerment (95% CI: 0.001; 0.003), but not at high levels of empowerment (95% CI: -0.004; 0.001), supporting study hypotheses. A sense of empowerment may reduce the negative impact and risk conferred by SGM-discriminatory experiences on NSSI and suicide behavior. Empowerment is a modifiable factor that can be addressed through CBT interventions and is a worthy target to consider for cultivating well-being and preventing self-harm within LGBTQ populations.