Bullying: For Gay and Lesbian Teens, Does Life Get Better After School?

2013-02-06

Two years ago, columnist and Seattle gay-rights advocate Dan Savage launched the “It Gets Better” project on YouTube. In reassuring video clips, adults promised homosexual kids — who are bullied and attempt suicide more than their straight peers — that life would get easier once they finished high school.

But does it really? Joseph Robinson, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, decided to apply a researcher’s eye to the question. In a new study, he concludes that yes, it does get better — for the most part. “The sentiment of the It Gets Better campaign is that things will get better because chances are you are not going to be bullied later in life,” says Robinson. “This is the first time we have strong empirical evidence to suggest it does get better.”

Most existing research focused only on whether lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) kids were bullied in high school. No good data had followed students annually as they progressed through their teen years. So Robinson turned to information collected in 2004 from the U.K.’s Department for Education on the experiences of 4,135 children who were ages 13 and 14; he also looked at data from 2010 when the same kids were ages 19 and 20.

“I was particularly interested in these data because we don’t have anything like this,” says Robinson. “I thought, This is the perfect opportunity to see if it does get better.”

The survey, which asked the students about their experiences with bullying, provided the perfect opportunity for comparing how rates of bullying changed over their lifetimes. According to Robinson’s research, which was published in the journal Pediatrics absolute rates of bullying declined over time for all students, regardless of sexual orientation. In the study, over half of LGB students reported being bullied at ages 13 or 14; less than 10% reported bullying at ages 19 or 20.

LGB youth are bullied almost twice as often as heterosexual youth in high school. But the trends diverged after high school depending on gender. After high school, bullying rates became comparable for lesbian and bisexual females compared to heterosexual females. At ages 13 to 14, 57% of lesbian and bisexual girls reported being bullied compared to 40% of straight girls; at ages 19 to 20, 6% of young women reported being bullied, regardless of sexual orientation.

For gay and bisexual males, however, the relative rates of bullying actually increased following high school; they were bullied four times as often as heterosexual males. “We think that might be because people hold more negative attitudes toward gay and bisexual males and are less accepting toward them than toward lesbian and bisexual females,” says Robinson.

At ages 13 and 14, 52% of gay and bisexual boys report being bullied versus 38% of straight boys. At ages 19 to 20, 9% of gay boys report being bullied compared to a little more than 2% of straight boys. “It definitely gets better on average for all gay kids,” he says. “Rates for gay men are getting better but when compared to straight boys, it’s still much higher. We would be remiss to ignore that in relative terms, it gets worse for gay men.”

The current study can’t explain why, but Robinson hopes that additional research can reveal why bullying continues to occur after high school and why gay and bisexual men in particular tend to be singled out, says Robinson.

In a second part of the study that focused on emotional stress, Robinson found that straight youth have low levels while LGB youth have more moderate levels. At ages 14 to 15 and again at ages 16 to 17, the kids were asked questions about their happiness and feelings of depression and worthlessness. Not surprisingly, the higher rates of bullying experienced by LGB children appear to be partially responsible for their greater levels of emotional dissatisfaction. But half the disparities are unexplained.

Prior research tends to suggest that the anxiety and distress LGB kids feel can be alleviated by being in schools with gay-straight alliances and those with anti-bullying policies, and by teachers whom they consider allies.

But perhaps the strongest allies these students have in learning to cope with their sexuality are their parents, says Adelle Cadieux, a pediatric psychologist at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich. “Parents should be open enough for their kids to even come out in the first place,” says Cadieux, who was not involved in the Pediatrics study. “A lot of youth aren’t comfortable telling their parents about their sexual orientation so they can’t even use their parents as a support system.”

Parents who are their children’s advocates can help by lobbying for anti-bullying laws in their states and policies at their children’s schools so that schools can become part of the solution. “Our kids do better emotionally and psychologically when they have good connectedness to their families,” says Cadieux. And even if that type of support can’t stop bullying, it can help students to confront it throughout their adult lives as well.

Bonnie Rochman @brochman

Bonnie Rochman writes about pregnancy, fertility, parenting — the ups and downs of being a kid and having one — for TIME.

Get Smarter: A Powerful Brain-Boosting Supplement You’ve Never Heard Of

Yesterday, more groundbreaking research came out demonstrating the impressive potential of the supplement phosphatidylcholine to improve brain health and smarts. Haven’t heard of it? You will – it’s looking to be one of the next anti-aging wonder pills.

The target in the University of Colorado study was schizophrenia – a subject both timely and topical after the mental illness-fueled massacres of the past year. Psychiatrist Robert Freedman, who also happens to be Editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, led a team of researchers who gave pregnant women phosphatidylcholine supplements in the last two trimesters of pregnancy, and after birth while they were nursing.

Then they tested the babies’ response to an auditory test that’s used as a “marker” for elevated risk of developing schizophrenia later in life. The choline-supplemented babies had double the chance of responding appropriately to the test, which involves analyzing their response to a series of repeated clicking sounds.

Previous studies have also documented the effects of prenatal choline supplementation on developing brains. In one double-blind study published in Brain Research, the offspring of pregnant mice fed supplemental choline had better memories, learned faster, and had larger brain cells compared to those fed a normal diet. In another mouse study, prenatal choline supplementation helped babies born with Down’s syndrome learn better and even protected the mice’s brains from Alzheimer’s later in life.

In turn, too little choline has negative effects on brain development, according to researchers at Stanford, who demonstrated that when women had low blood levels of choline they were at higher risk of their babies developing neural tube defects. The reason that phosphatidylcholine is being studied so intensively for its effects on the brain is that it’s a precursor of choline and acetylcholine, which play a key role in brain activity.

Why do studies on prenatal supplementation matter to the rest of us? Because it’s not just the prenatal brain that’s stimulated and strengthened by phosphatidylcholine (PC). Neuroscientists have been studying the potential of choline to prevent cognitive decline and the onset of Alzheimer’s and dementia and even to regrow brain cells as we age. In several oft-cited studies by Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross of Princeton University, phosphatidylcholine was found to stimulate the growth of new brain cells and neural connections, a process known as neurogenesis and once thought impossible after a certain age.

Researchers are studying phosphatidylcholine’s effect on numerous conditions that seem oddly unrelated to each other. That’s because it’s value comes from its role as a key building block of cell membranes, which means it protects the cells that line the digestive tract and the liver, as well as brain and nerve cells. Phosphatidylcholine can lower cholesterol, protect the liver from disease, including hepatitis, and appears to help alcoholics stave off cirrhosis.

Doctors often recommend PC to people living with hepatitis C for its liver-protective benefits, particularly in conjunction with interferon therapy. By protecting the cells that line the digestive tract and reducing inflammation, PC may also ease conditions such as ulcerative colitis and IBS.

Pharmaceutical companies are getting on the PC bandwagon too. PLx Pharmaceuticals of Houston has numerous products in the pipeline that use PC to protect the gastrointestinal tract from the caustic effects of NSAIDs. Called PLxGuard, the technology is being tested in an over-the-counter aspirin product and in drugs for osteoarthritis, chronic pain, gout, and other conditions.

In 2012, PLx received a half-million-dollar-grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver foundation to study the potential of using PC to prevent intestinal perforation in premature and low-birthweight infants being treated with IV indomethacin, an NSAID-based drug treatment used to treat a common congenital heart defect that’s the leading cause of death in these babies.

Lipid Therapeutics of Heidelberg Germany is testing a phosphatidylcholine-based drug therapy to treat ulcerative colitis. The drug, currently called, LT-02, completed a successful Phase IIB trial in 2011.

Weirdly, PC is also the substance used in cosmetic procedures that dissolve fat. Injected under the skin, phosphatidylcholine was first used by dermatologists to dissolve lipomas and other fatty deposits under the skin and is now used (in procedures known as body contouring) in areas like the thighs and under the eyes and, in recent studies, under the chin. Numerous studies are ongoing about the safety of this procedure.

If you’re confused and wondering about the connection between phosphatidycholine, soy, and lecithin, a supplement you may have experimented with in the past, here’s how the connection works. Phosphatidylcholine is actually a purified extract of lecithin, which contains several different phospholipids, and 10 to 20 percent of which are phosphatidylcholine. Soy is usually the source of supplemental lecithin and phosphatidylcholine.

In the past few years, as research has zeroed in on the specific benefits of phosphatidylcholine, lecithin products with higher levels of this specific phospholipid became available, and now supplements labeled phosphatidylcholine share the shelves with those labeled lecithin, or soy lecithin.

Eggs and soybeans are the best source of choline, followed by meat (particularly liver), seeds, and nuts. But it’s not easy to get enough phosphatidylcholine from your diet, particularly if you’re trying to cut down on meat and eggs to control cholesterol. Most of the experiments with PC have been done with upwards of 5000 mg (the schizophrenia study used 6300 in two doses), and you’d likely need a choline-rich diet and a supplement to get anywhere close to that level.

Note: When buying supplements, look closely at the number of milligrams in each capsule, and the dosage. The brand I bought, labeled confusingly (see illo), turned out to contain just 400 mg per soft gel capsule so I would need to take 6 pills to get the active dose used in the schizophrenia study.

Confusingly enough, there is another phospholipid that natural health gurus are also touting for its memory sharpening effects. Phosphatidyl serine (PS) is also being studied for its effects on mood regulation, cognitive function, and anti-aging.

How Your Brain Tells You When It’s Time for a Break

Are you reading this when you should be working? If so, then it may be because your brain signaled that continuing to work was not worth the cost in tedium of forcing yourself to stay on task.

New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers insight into how people decide when to keep going and when to take a break. That decision apparently hinges on a specific signal that at its peak— say, when your muscles are screaming that you can’t do another rep or your brain refuses to focus on the page — prompts you to quit. And when your body and brain are refreshed and ready to go again, the signal quiets down and gets out of your way.

The peaks and valleys that trigger these decisions, however, are not pre-set: they’re influenced by how much effort you’re expending and how big a reward you expect from the work. The bigger the reward and the smaller the effort required, the more likely you are to keep going until you’ve done what needs doing. As you work, it seems, your brain continuously calibrates your breaking point in relation to your expectations of gain.

To understand this signaling, researchers led by Mathias Pessiglione of the Motivation Brain and Behavior Laboratory of INSERM in Paris, France, studied 39 people using two brain imaging techniques—fMRI, which maps blood flow to particular brain regions as participants perform certain tasks, and MEG, which uses magnetic fields to follow the brain’s electrical signaling. They were tested while squeezing a handgrip at maximum effort to earn varying monetary rewards. The handgrip was calibrated to each person’s strength and the intensity of effort was displayed on a computer screen as a thermometer— participants had to keep the fluid level in the thermometer over a certain point in order to win the money.

While the volunteers were warned that the amount of effort required might vary during the test, they did not know when it would change. They were shown on the screen how much money was at stake in each 30 second trial— 10, 20 or 50 cents in Euros— and instructed to try to win as much as possible.

During the challenge, both types of brain scans showed activity in a region involved in pain perception, known as the posterior insula. The signal there became more intense when greater effort was required— but less strong when the same level of effort was connected with a bigger potential reward. Bigger rewards also led to a muted signal during rest periods between the tests, meaning people would both expend more effort and require less rest when more was at stake.

The authors write, “[This] process might implement the intuitive psychological phenomenon that, when motivated, we literally push back our limits,” allowing us to worker harder for longer. The study did not ask participants about whether they actually felt less pain or fatigue when expecting bigger rewards, although other research suggests that this change in perception may drive the way the signal affects behavior.

For example, research on pain perception shows that placebos and medications can both relieve pain by changing signaling in this region— and other studies suggest that situational factors like music, stress or the presence of an attractive potential mate also affect how much pain is seen as tolerable.

“[T]he brain can indeed adjust the sensitivity of these regions depending on expectations,” the authors conclude. To push yourself through the pain, it seems, it helps to expect great gain.