I've wanted to write news articles about LGBTT mental health here for quite some time now. I will inaugurate this column with an essay written by Eric O. Jackson-Rivera, B.A., C.P.S. He is a Certified Peer Specialist with 30 years of experience in LGBTT mental health and activism.

Future columns will detail specific mental health issues for the LGBTT community.

Being LGBTT in 2013 and Beyond                  

     As I write this article it’s still some weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision regarding gay marriage. I’m not following the case in all its details and am not an authority on the legal issues before the court, but of what we citizens know and have experienced regarding gay marriage and other LGBTT issues, we can speak from peer and peer work experience about many Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Transsexual (LGBTT) issues in the context of health, mental health, wellness, and public health.

     It’s with such experience that we safely coincide with experts and academics when it’s stated that discrimination, rejection, social and cultural ostracism, and other examples geared to destroy a cultural group such as the LGBTTs, are greatly responsible for far too many mental health and addiction problems, homelessness, and the corresponding problems that come with such.

     With the desire to address and help fix these problems is that those of us concerned with our personal wellness and that of the general society and the LGBTT’s, it’s that we see steps like gay marriage as one more step to provide the structures and supports to make LGBTT life the good, happy and healthy life experience to which all citizens are entitled to.

     Gay marriage and other LGBTT issues are indeed health issues for those who decide to accept their LGBTT identity as one that is a good part of our human identity not to be reverted, changed, hidden, repressed, or in any other way destroyed.

     Many LGBTT youth and adults, to state one example, who are or were homeless, or who at one time faced or are currently facing seriously unmanageable crisis of addictions and mental health, were before a part of a family, a community, or a religious group which rejected and ostracized them from the traditions, supports and structures which granted other members of such groups opportunities of living happier, more prosperous lives within institutional structures and supports benefitting citizens who do not stray from the heterosexual lifestyle, marriage included.

     While you find many instances of health, mental health, and public health issues in the heterosexual-supported community, these problems sometimes manifest in greater rates in LGBTT people and communities, and many times the culprit variables are, among others, serious patterns of discrimination, rejection—including blood-family rejection—, social and cultural bullying and ostracism, diminished economic supports and opportunities, etc.