All it needs to be is plausible. It doesn't need to be accurate or even right.

After the UVA Rape Hoax fiasco, I haven't read anything from Rolling Stone in a long time. Everybody gets facts wrong sometimes but that case was such a perfect example of motivated reporting. They found what they were looking for even though they had to ignore glaring counter-evidence. Exhibit A for journalists as postmodernist, critical theory Mandarin Class bullies and enforcers. They wanted to ruin people's lives who had done nothing wrong other than to be the target of Rolling Stone's animus.

I spot an article, Nearly 40% of LGBTQ Youth Have Contemplated Suicide by Nico Lang. This is a topic I am interested in. Not LGBTQ suicide per se but the larger issue of rising suicide rates as well as rising drug overdose deaths. A death toll approaching 100,000 a year and evidence of some fundamental loss of connection with life. It is perplexing that in a world of rising prosperity, health, education etc. we should also see such a rise in hopelessness.

Its just a matter of a click. Let's see if Rolling Stone has rectified itself.

No.

It is still steeped in cheap press-release, innumerate, and ideological journalism.

From the opening paragraph there are red flags. Nowhere in the article is there any sort of assessment of the methodology or critical review of the findings. An advocacy group did a study, sent it to a sympathetic scribbler who added some puff around the edges and then sent it to their editor who then published it.

It quickly emerges that this is simply another advocacy group trying to get cheap "data" by doing an online survey of self-selected respondents, a methodology so discredited for so long you would think no one would bother. But even though the results are always meaningless it does have the fact that it is cheap going for it.

Nearly four in 10 LGBTQ youth contemplated taking their own lives in the past year, according to a new report.

A survey released on Tuesday by youth suicide prevention organization the Trevor Project found that 39% of LGBTQ respondents between the ages of 13 and 24 “seriously considered suicide” within the past 12 months. Of the 34,000 individuals polled, trans and gender nonconforming youth — who made up about a third of participants — were among the most likely to attempt to end their lives. Around one in three members of this group reported attempting suicide in the past year.

39% is alarming, but I need some reference. What is the baseline for all 13-24 year olds? The report does not provide that information because they excluded cisgender straights from the survey.

From this site, it would seem that the baseline for all teens/young adults contemplating suicide is 17%. So the implication is that LGBTQ have perhaps twice the risk of thinking about suicide than your average youth. Except we are probably comparing apples and oranges. Online surveys with self-selected participants are often highly motivated and survey responses are extremely sensitive to framing and wording. In the methodology section of the actual report they go to great lengths to imply that this was a legitimate study, even indicating that:

In order to better understand how our sample compares to a national probabilistic sample, we included questions regarding suicidality that were identical to those used by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS).

OK, sounds good. But let's see the survey itself to see how the questions were framed. It is not provided. Nor is there any obvious link or reference to the source survey. Nor is the underlying data provided. Methodology, survey instrument and actual data are the hallmarks of solid research. One out of three doesn't quite cut it.

When you get inside the details of the report, it also emerges that the actual population surveyed and used for analytic purposes was 25,896 rather than the headlined 34,000. Nearly 33% overstated. Why make exaggerated claims of sample size (particularly for an already large sample)? Sure seems to betray an underlying concern to spin this as more rigorous than it is.

Another concern is the representativeness of the survey. Only 3% of participants are African-American compared to 14% of the population. Since we know African-Americans have dramatically lower suicide rates than whites, surely this near absence must skew the results to some material degree.

Since I suspect that the study authors would jump at the chance to claim that LGBTQ have more than twice the exposure of thinking about suicide (39% versus 17%) compared to non-LGBTQ youth, a logical conclusion is that possibly non-LGBTQ participants, were they to take a similarly worded and framed survey, might have a much higher response than 17%. If they came in at 25-35%, easily achievable with the right wording and framing of survey questions, then that wouldn't meet the needs of the authors and therefore would be omitted from the reporting.

Pure speculation but this is an old play we have seen many times. We know how it works.

Even though the survey had nothing to do with politics and even though we now know that despite the mainstream media ballyhooing a rise in hate crimes the day of Trump's election even though the subesquent actual data has shown a fall, Lang has to shoehorn the press release into the ideological box.

These outside environmental factors also include what’s happening in national and local politics, according to the Trevor Project. More than three in four respondents — or 76% — said the political landscape had impacted their mental health in the past year.

The survey, however, did not ask specifically about the Trump administration, which has repeatedly curtailed LGBTQ rights since the president took office in January 2017. Within the past month, the White House has proposed rolling back federal nondiscrimination protections for trans people in health care and put forward potential guidelines that would allow faith-based adoption and foster agencies to turn away same-sex couples.

Enough. Rolling Stone reporting is still mired in its ideological fantasies and still happy to accommodate cognitive pollution where it supports preexisting beliefs and is cheap to purvey. And of course advocacy groups will continue to churn out alarming statistics free from the rigors of scientific discipline in order to gin up free money from donors, government or foundations. All it needs to be is plausible. It doesn't need to be accurate or even right.

The biggest disconnect for this article is in putting this all in context. Other than children below 15, 15-24 youth have the lowest suicide rate of all age demographics. The highest, and about 25% higher than 15-24 year olds are 45-54 year olds.

Even more striking is the demographic concentration. 70% of suicides are committed by 18% of the population - adult white males.

All suicide is tragic and we should do what we can to advance our frontiers of knowledge in order to better address how to prevent all suicides. My one take away from this article, other than that Rolling Stone is still in the mire, is that mental health is still terra incognita. In fact that would have been an interesting twist to this study.

The study highlights that trans and non-conforming have exceptionally high suicidal ideation. But we also know that they have exceptionally high psychological conditions. The study wants all this to be laid at the feet of a cruel society and no doubt some of the consequences do lay there.

But how much? And how much lays with underlying psychological issues? If the bulk reside with psychological issues, then that is where the focus should be.

It is too serious a topic, (100,000 remember), to be used as a football for money-grubbing by advocacy groups and press release journalism by penny-pinching and ideologically sympathetic mainstream media.