Transcript

Liam Leonard – Private Lives 2

Liam Leonard

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Meghan Lodwick:

Welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I'm your host Meghan Lodwick and today I'm interviewing Liam Leonard, a Research Fellow at La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society. He was lead author for Private Lives 2, the Second National Survey of the Health and Wellbeing of Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual and Transgender Australians. Liam will be telling us about the aims of these surveys, which have been influential in shaping both perception and policy.

Liam Leonard:

In 2006 with Private Lives 1 it was really the first ever national survey of this population. It was the first survey to provide baseline evidence around the health and wellbeing of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender Australians. The first report was very important in providing evidence to government, non-government agencies, that there was a need to address the health of this population and demonstrating particular areas where their health was considerably worse than the population as a whole. So it was a really strong political and advocacy tool, the first Private Lives, and a lot of local community agencies also used the results from Private Lives 1 to actually go to the agencies on the ground where they were located to say, look, our population in this particular local government area, or whatever, also has particular needs. So it was used right through from policy through to research through to community organisations and to people working in particular health related areas, just to argue that there was a need. Six years on, there's clearly a need to do that, but things have changed dramatically. The Minister for Mental Health was announcing four million dollars, looking at same sex attracted and sex and gender diverse young people, Beyond Blue is talking about committing one and half million dollars to anti homophobia campaigns, and they're saying that part of the reason they're doing that, is the success of that first Private Lives report. So Private Lives 2 is working in a very different space. It's still important, however, that we do periodic updates, to see how things are changing. One of the things that Private Lives 2 shows is that although health of GLBT people is improving and is very close now to the general health of the population as a whole, the mental health of this population has not shifted since the first Private Lives 1 and that GLBT people have poorer mental health outcomes than the population as a whole. So what we do see in this sort of comparison between the two, is some of the things that are shifting, hopefully improving, and some of the things that in fact aren't, where we still need to put increased effort.

Meghan Lodwick:

You mentioned that the mental health of GLBT Australians is lower than the general population. Why do you think that is?

Liam Leonard:

What we've been arguing and what research suggests, but it's very hard to get a causal link, is to suggest that for populations, particularly minority and marginal groups, that their experiences of systemic discrimination have very, very major impacts on their mental health. So if you feel ostracised, if you feel stigmatised, if you feel socially isolated, those are all risk factors for reduced mental health, and one of the major risk factors of feeling ostracised or stigmatised is clearly discrimination. So we would argue that the reduced mental health outcomes for GLBT people are still a direct consequence of systemic homophobia and transphobia. And that's why it was so interesting to hear Jeff Kennett, who's the Chair of Beyond Blue, saying that Beyond Blue are putting some money into public education campaigns. So they're starting to address the mental health of this community, which is changing attitudes, reducing discrimination.

Meghan Lodwick:

Now, in Private Lives 2, you surveyed people from the ages of 16 to 89. Was there predominantly an age group that was affected more so than the rest?

Liam Leonard:

From 16 up to 89 we found that 16 to 24 year olds are particularly vulnerable it would appear, to the effects of discrimination and to the pressures around questioning their sexuality and their gender identity. So we did find, yes, that 16 to 24 year olds have poorer mental health outcomes than other age groups within the GLBT community. So mental health improves and the data suggests that around 55, GLBT people's mental health starts to actually match the levels of the population as a whole. But it takes that long. There's lots of reasons people argue that is, as people age, and they get through a lot of that discrimination, they become more comfortable in the world and with themselves and some of the effects of that discrimination starts to wane. The data also showed that bi-sexuals are particularly vulnerable, so mental health data shows that if you look within the GLBT community, not doing a comparison with the mainstream, but within the groups that make up the GLBT community, bi-sexual women in particular are at increased risk of depression and psychological distress compared to lesbians and gay men and bi-sexual men. So you have differences within the GLBT community, not just in terms of age, but in terms of sexuality, and we've found many of the trans respondents, trans males and females, were at increased risk as well, of psychological distress, anxiety and a number of other mental health related issues.

Meghan Lodwick:

Because of that discrimination, is it hard for people to identify with certain groups and areas in the community?

Liam Leonard:

This is where we really need to pull the data apart, more than the report actually does. What I said was that for bi-sexual women, their rates of depression, their rates of psychological distress and anxiety are higher than for lesbian women, which would suggest that bi-sexuality is playing out in particular ways for women. However, in terms of being open and out, the group that are least likely to be open, are bi-sexual men. Whereas for most gay men and most lesbians, home and family are sort of havens, with about 80% of respondents saying that they never hid their sexuality or gender identity when they were with family or at home, but a much, much lower percentage of bi-sexual men said that they never hid, which means those people are actually disguising their bi-sexuality at home or with family members – a much higher percentage. Bi-sexual women were somewhere in between. We have to look at some really complicated cross-correlations before we can make statements around bi-sexualities operating in this way or trans-gender issues are operating that way compared to same sex attraction. Within the GLBT community we need to do a much more rigorous analysis than is in the report at the moment.

Meghan Lodwick:

So you mean is there gender confusion, or …

Liam Leonard:

No I just think that for bi-sexual women, issues around gender and femininity are playing out differently for bi-sexual men than the intersections between their sexuality and their masculinity. They're not getting the same patterns of mental and general health between these two populations. So bi-sexuality alone isn't what's going on.

Meghan Lodwick:

Private Lives 1 came out of course in 2006 and there's been some legislative reform since then. Did that show up anywhere in the report?

Liam Leonard:

We asked respondents whether they were aware of the legislative reforms and they came into play I think in 2009. There've been a raft of legislative reforms but we asked about particular legislation that recognised same sex couples as de facto couples for the purpose of Centrelink and family allowance and a number of other things. And we found that about 89% I think of the sample were aware, and about 10% of the total sample said they'd been directly affected by those legislative changes, child support, disability allowances. So now that they were recognised as part of a couple, most of those people said they'd actually lost some of their economic entitlements because they were once single and now they're being assessed against a partner, who may actually have an income. About 60% of the respondents who said they'd been affected, were highly critical of the changes, about 40% were quite supportive.

Meghan Lodwick:

What other kind of reform would you like to see, or maybe amendments to the raft of reforms that have already gone through?

Liam Leonard:

At the moment in Australia in most jurisdictions, same sex couples and non gender normative couples are recognised more or less as de facto. So there are all the issues around same sex marriage of course which sit in the background. I do think it's important that same sex relationships have some form of symbolic recognition. It's all well and good to treat us as economically the same, but it's still a subtle form of devaluation, a subtle form of stigma, not to recognise the symbolic weight and value of those relationships. To say yes, we'll acknowledge for an economic unit, you're the same as, but symbolically we think you're slightly second class. So that's an interesting space. What we would like, we'd like some publicly funded anti-homophobia campaigns. The government funds, in the same way that there have been campaigns against violence and discrimination against other groups. Those sorts of broad based campaigns are very expensive, but if we're going to shift attitudes and get rid of this sort of residual homophobia, if we're going to have really social change riding on top of all this legislative reform, we actually need those broad based government sanctioned anti-homophobia campaigns, and it was interesting just listening to the amount of money that Beyond Blue are putting in. You know, it was 1.5 million which just shows you these are very, very expensive initiatives. I also think, leaving aside actual legislative reform, training health care providers, particularly in the mental health space, to be sensitive and aware of the needs of their GLBT clients. We would like government, particularly government funded services, to say, the services that you fund in the mental health space, or drug and alcohol, or community health, we want you to build into these diversity plans a pre-requisite that staff are trained in GLBT competencies, because then that means that a young people who's GLBT who has a mental health problem, or a drug and alcohol problem, will not be scared that in turning up to a mainstream service, they'll be discriminated against. They'll know that the worker who fronts up to them has been trained in these sensitivities. That would be the next thing that I'd see as a really important outcome of this sort of research.

Meghan Lodwick:

It was lovely to hear a lot of the funding that was going towards more awareness and the advocacy for the community. I do notice it's predominantly targeted towards young people. Why is that?

Liam Leonard:

Well, there are probably a number of reasons. You can see from the data, as you asked earlier, that young people are particularly vulnerable, and it's all well and good to say that things get better as GLBTs age, but that's for the GLBT people who survive, so going back fifteen years, the rates of suicide among young people linked to their sexuality or gender identity were frighteningly high. You can see why there's an impetus to put some of the money into that space. I also think politically it's probably easier to put money into young people, because they're constructed as vulnerable and we do understand that young people are dealing with a whole set of complicated issues. So it's an easy win I think for a number of agencies to put their money there. But I do think we need to pay attention to the sort of work that Beyond Blue's doing and other agencies, that aren't just targeting young people. That was a large amount of money that's actually not targeting GLBT people at all, it's targeting homophobic attitudes in the general community. So I do think that if you listen to the raft of funding, yes some of it is going to young people, but for the first time, there is quite a lot of money being spent in quite creative and new areas, to address the issues for this community.

Meghan Lodwick:

Liam Leonard there. He's now hard at work as the new Director of the Gay and Lesbian Health Victoria. That's all the time we've got for a La Trobe University podcast. If you'd like to leave feedback about this or any other podcast in the series, or suggest a possible topic, you can get in touch with us at at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.