LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their same-age heterosexual or cisgender peers, and experts say it’s not their sexual orientation or gender identity that ups their suicide risk but the isolation and stigma they feel because of discrimination against it.

Kelli Agrawal, a USF College of Public Health (COPH) PhD student, decided to look at a form of resilience known as communicative resilience and its ability to curb suicides among LGBTQ+ communities. Her research, “Assessing Communicative Resilience in Suicide Prevention for LGBTQ+ Communities: A Qualitative Analysis of Community Conversations,” was published in July in the American Journal of Health Promotion. Co-authors include the COPH’s Drs. Joe Bohn, Abraham Salinas-Miranda and others.

Communicative resilience relies on discourse and interaction to enable and promote resilience.

“It occurs when day-to-day communication enables people to adapt or transform through difficult times,” Agrawal said. “It doesn’t just happen in response to difficult times though, it is something we can experience in our day-to-day lives that can benefit us when we inevitably experience disruptions, challenges or crises.”

Agrawal, who has helped facilitate a COPH-initiated suicide prevention program called Growing Hope, said the idea to look at communicative resilience and its role in suicide prevention among the LGBTQ+ population was almost accidental.

“Upon initially reviewing the transcripts from community conversations [defined by Agrawal as problem-solving discourse among those interested in addressing a challenge in their community], I began to recognize processes of communication resilience described in the participants’ responses,” Agrawal noted. “At the time, the Growing Hope project had only facilitated one town hall on suicide prevention, and it was for the LGBTQ+ communities in Pinellas County. We had originally planned to only utilize open coding for the analysis, but the processes were identified so clearly (and repeatedly) that we decided to explore them further.”

Agrawal and her co-authors found that communicative resilience—which included identifying strengths, sharing stories of healing and offering strategies for hope—can be an effective suicide-prevention resource.

And while using communicative resilience in suicide prevention is under-utilized and under-studied, Agrawal hopes that will change.

“Public health needs to do more to address suicide with pro-active, strengths-based, community-level strategies,” Agrawal said. “Whether face-to-face, over the phone or virtually…we are in near-constant communication with others. I think there is power and hope in being able to recognize that there are strategies and actions we can all proactively take in our day-to-day lives that can help prevent suicide in our homes, schools, workplaces and communities. The key is recognizing them, knowing how to effectively engage in them and realizing that they can make a difference. It’s not about individual resilience, it’s about collective resilience. It’s about how we interact with one another day-to-day, how we show up in our communities and how our communities show up for us.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health