Symposia
Suicide and Self-Injury
Sarah E. Victor, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas
Kale Edmiston, PhD (he/him/his)
Associate Professor
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
Worcester, Massachusetts
Background. Transgender and non-binary (TNB) people reported elevated rates of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB) compared to cisgender people (Surace et al., 2020). Minority stress theory and research suggest that intrapersonal stressors, such as victimization or rejection due to one’s gender, relate to increased risk of SITB for TNB people (Goldblum et al., 2012). Prior research in primarily cisgender samples has demonstrated interpersonal stressors as potent risk factors for SITB (Victor et al., 2019), yet little work has directly compared interpersonal stressors driven by one’s gender identity (gender-related stressors, GRS) with other types of interpersonal stressors (other interpersonal stressors, OIS) as proximal predictors of SITB. Method. To address this gap, we examined ecological momentary assessment data collected from recently suicidal TNB adults (N = 49). Participants were prompted 6 times a day for 21 days to report on recent SITB and interpersonal stressors; for stressors that occurred, participants were asked whether they attributed them to their gender identity and/or to something else. Using dynamic structural equation modeling, we examined lagged associations between GRS, OIS, and SITB, controlling for autoregressive effects over time. Results. In all models, presence of GRS was associated with presence of OIS at the same time (within-person level), but there was no association between GRS and OIS aggregated for each person over the entire study interval (between-person level). Current suicidal ideation was predicted by the occurrence of both GRS (B = .2) and OIS (B = .15) since the prior survey; this pattern was also observed when predicting current non-suicidal self-injury urges (GRS B = .24, OIS B = .17). However, prior survey GRS and OIS did not predict next survey non-suicidal self-injury nor suicidal behavior. Conclusions. These results demonstrate several important points. First, TNB people are negatively impacted by interpersonal stressors driven by a variety of factors, not solely those attributed to gender minority stress. Second, even in the context of OIS, GRS showed unique, and larger, influences on suicidal ideation and non-suicidal self-injury urges, relative to other stressors. Finally, predictors of self-injurious thoughts may differ from predictors of self-injurious behaviors among TNB adults, consistent with ideation-to-action theories of suicide (Klonsky et al., 2018).