Queer youth and mental health: What do educators need to know?

Abstract

This paper considers the educational implications of the recent emphasis on the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer (LGBTQ) people in Ireland. Operating from the perspective that discourses constitute rather than merely reflect material reality, thereby shaping or ‘structuring’ how we think about, and act, in relation to queer experience, the paper critically engages with discourses which position LGBTQ youth as universally at risk of mental health difficulties, including self-harm and suicidality. It also challenges the corresponding preoccupation with homophobic bullying as the primary lens through which queer experience is understood and addressed in schools, arguing that more space needs to be devoted to other, less harrowing narratives of LGBTQ experience and identity. It highlights some of the more problematic effects of LGBTQ mental health research which frame LGBTQ experience primarily in terms of vulnerability and victimhood and makes the case for a more expansive engagement with LGBTQ identities. The article illuminates the potential that after-queer scholarship holds for a re-imagining of queer youth, sexuality and gender within educational and social research, curriculum materials and educational institutions more generally and concludes with a consideration of specific knowledge and skills that educators should be equipped with in order to disrupt normative understandings of gender and sexuality.

Keywords:

• mental health
• suicidality
• discourse
• sexuality
• after-queer scholarship

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paula Mayock, Nicola Carr and Karl Kitching, my co-researchers on the original Supporting LGBT Lives Study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Audrey Bryan teaches Sociology at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University. Her research is primarily concerned with experiences of those who are ‘othered’ and marginalized by inequitable and discriminatory educational structures, relations, and practices, and with the broad pedagogical and ethical question of what it means to educate for social and global justice. She has published nationally and internationally in the areas of critical citizenship education, development studies, anti-racism education and mental health.

Notes

1 The terms ‘LGBTQ’/’LGBTI’ and ‘queer’ are used interchangeably here, and ‘queer’ is used in a political sense. The term ‘queer’, as Ahmed (2004) explains, was originally used as a term of abuse and injury, where to be queer was to be abnormal and not straight. While often still used by some as a term of abuse, ‘queer’ has acquired a new set of meanings in the context of queer politics. As Ahmed (2004, 166) explains: ‘ … In queer politics, the force of insult is retained; “the not” is not negated (“we are positive”), but embraced, and is taken on as a name.’ However, people will experience or ‘hear’ this term differently, depending on their psycho-biographical as well as institutional histories.

2 The term ‘discourse’ is used here to refer to a set of meanings which structure how we think about a given topic which in turn shapes how we should respond or act in relation to it.