For healthcare providers, Ryan’s team is also creating a risk-assessment tool so they can quickly gauge the level of family rejection and evaluate an LGBT child or adolescent’s risk for depression, suicide, substance abuse, HIV infection, or sexually transmitted diseases.

Ryan sees wide application for the FAP in improving wellness, strengthening families, and helping keep young people in their homes and in school.

“What our work has done,” Ryan said, “is to establish that family rejection has a serious impact on an LGBT young person’s health and mental health, and also family acceptance both protects against risk and promotes well being.”

Mitchell Gold, founder of furniture company Mitchell Gold + Bob William as well as Faith in America, an organization dedicated to ending religion-based bigotry, also sees a great need for Ryan’s work. Gold himself has just published Crisis, a collection of stories by 40 well-known gay and lesbian Americans describing their own experiences growing up in fear and isolation.

He said, “Hopefully Dr. Ryan’s report will serve as the tipping point to bringing an end to the harm parents cause to their LGB children. The information contained can be particularly helpful to well meaning parents. Hopefully and most importantly, it will be a wake-up call to those parents steeped in misguided and ill informed religious beliefs. The spiritual and emotional violence to these kids must stop.”

Gold noted, too, that Ryan’s work itself should send a cautionary message to the major state and national LGBT advocacy groups.

“We must focus on the harm caused to LGB teens and not only on the civil rights adults are denied,” he said. “We need to take this information to create a climate change in America of how gay teens are treated.”

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