The impact of transgender minority stress and emotion regulation on suicidality and self-harm

ABSTRACT

Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals experience high levels of minority stress, as well as a high prevalence of suicidality and self-harm. The current study investigates if emotion regulation mediates the relationships of minority stressors with self-harm and suicidality. TGD adult primary care patients (N = 115) completed a survey including measures of minority stressors, emotion dysregulation, self-harm, and suicidality. Emotion regulation mediated the relationship between victimisation and suicidality. Emotion regulation did not mediate the relationship between victimisation and self-harm. TGD individuals’ suicide risk may be increased when they experience victimisation through increased emotion dysregulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• gender diverse
• emotion regulation
• suicidality
• self-harm

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Dr. Cameron Mosley for her assistance with survey design related to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data is available upon reasonable request from the first author.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2022.2158363.

Additional information

Funding

Aaron Mahajan participated in this project thanks to funding from the Medical Scholars program at the Medical College of Georgia;Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University [Medical Scholars Program];