AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
2004 FEB 23 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Recent experience as the target of anti-gay violence or threats, not identifying as gay, or feeling alienated from the gay community are the major predictors of depression in men who have sex with men (MSM), and public health officials should address these issues by seeking changes in social policies, say University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) researchers.
"Hate-crime laws targeting anti-gay violence, recognition of gay relationships through same-sex marriage or domestic partnership laws, and programs encouraging gay men to come out' and to integrate into the gay community should be studied as ways to tackle the public health problem we found of high rates of depression among MSM," said Thomas C. Mills, MD, MPH, a retired associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) who is prinicpal author of a new study.
The study, published in the February 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that MSM have depression at a rate three times greater than men in general. Rates of drug and alcohol abuse, HIV status and socioeconomic variables were not significant predictors of depression in MSM.
"We were ...
Source: HighBeam Research, Change in social policies could reduce high rate of depression in...