Adverse Childhood Experiences and Depressive Symptoms Among Female Sexual Minorities in China

Abstract

Background: Despite the relationship between Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and depressive symptoms, which has been well conducted in general populations, little is known about homosexual and bisexual populations, especially female sexual minorities in China. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of ACEs and depressive symptoms and to analyze the relationship between them among female sexual minorities in China.

Methods: The eligible participants were aged 16 years or older who report their sexual orientation as homosexual or bisexual. The data was collected through anonymous questionnaires under the help of Lespark in Bejing from July 18 to December 29, 2018. Univariate analysis and multiple linear regression analyses were performed to explore the relationship between ACEs and depressive symptoms among female sexual minorities. All statistical analyses were conducted by the software of SPSS 22.0.

Results: Among 301 female sexual minorities,51.5% reported at least one ACE, in which emotional neglect (22.6%) and emotional abuse (22.3%) were common ACEs. 24.6% reported that they had suffered only one type of ACE, and 10% have suffered four or more ACEs. As for depressive symptoms of female sexual minorities, the detection rate was 56.1%. The multiple linear regression analyses showed that abuse (β=2.95, p＜0.05) and neglect (β=3.21,p＜0.05) were positively correlated with depressive symptoms and female sexual minorities with three (β=4.11, p＜0.05) or more (β=6.02, p＜0.001) ACEs suffered from more depressive symptoms than others.

Conclusion: Both ACEs and depressive symptoms were at high prevalence among female sexual minorities in China. ACEs were associated with depressive symptoms, especially childhood abuse and neglect experiences that have a significant effect on female sexual minorities’ mental health.

Background

Lesbian, also known as lily, lace, and so on, refers to the female individual whose gender identity is female, but significantly and lastingly attracted to women in emotional, romantic, and sexual aspects, as to seek female sexual activities for sexual satisfaction[1, 2]. As a type of marginalized sexual minority group, female sexual minorities are less and tend to hide[3, 4], resulting in difficulties to find them. For instance, a survey on adult sexual orientation conducted in the United States showed that lesbians and bisexual women accounted for 1.3% and 2.4% of all surveyed women, respectively[4]. A study conducted in Australia on the sexual orientation of women aged 14 and above showed, 1.1% of the individuals identified themselves as homosexual and 1.4% as bisexual[3]. Still, among the women aged 15 to 24, 2.7% were lesbians and 7.4% were bisexual[5]in a cross-sectional survey conducted in Shanghai, China. China, as a traditional developing country, people here have poor acceptance of homosexuals, which leads to the concealment of lesbian identity and marginalization of society[6, 7]. It has been reported that about 1/3 of HIV new cases are homosexual men[8], and due to the higher HIV infection rate[9, 10], men who have sex with men (MSM) are focused by more and more research, while less attention has been paid to lesbians. However, besides the same stress from traditional marriage and family outlook as MSM, lesbians are more likely to have a crisis on low self-identity because of their unique sensitivity and social pressure[11]. At the same time, lesbians also suffer from many psychological and behavioral problems[12, 13], such as anxiety, depression, high-risk sexual behavior, and substance abuse, which greatly threaten their physical and mental health and the quality of life. China's lesbian organizations are still very weak and lack of relevant resources[11, 14], which makes it difficult to provide effective, convenient, and fast protection for female sexual minorities. Last but not least, lesbians and bisexuals as a sexual minority group that deserves special attention.

Compared with heterosexual women, lesbians have a greater likelihood(OR=2.4, 95%CI=2.0-2.9) of suffering from depressive symptoms[12]. Depressive symptoms is close associated with physical and mental health, such as peptic ulcer, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, and decline of immune function[15]. What’s more, those people with long-lasting depressive symptoms are more likely to have suicidal ideation[16] and high-risk sexual behaviors[17], which give rise to the heavy social burden and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Therefore, it is vital to explore the influence factors of depressive symptoms among female sexual minorities.

Studies have confirmed that early life experiences have an impact on health throughout the life course[18, 19]. ACEs are identified as traumatic events, including all types of abuse, neglect and violence that occur to minors who are under the age of 18[20]. ACEs can bring about the increasing risk of poor health outcomes, e.g. substance abuse[18], poor physical health-related indices[20], socially unacceptable behaviors[20, 21], anxiety [22], especially the symptoms of depression[23, 24]. Studies abroad have showed a close correlation between ACEs and mental health, especially depressive symptoms among general population[25, 26],and the whole sexual minorities[27]. However, few studies on the relationship between ACEs and depressive symptoms directly focused on female sexual minorities, especially in China. Therefore, this present study aims to investigate the prevalence of ACEs and depressive symptoms and to explore the relationship between them among female sexual minorities in China.

Methods

Depressive symptoms

Depressive symptoms were measured by the Centers for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CESD-10). The scale including 10 items is often applicable to assess frequency of depressive symptoms in the past 7 days. It is a four-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 3(always). The total score ranges 0-30, and higher score indicates higher level of depressive symptoms. Individual scoring 10 or higher will be considered to have depressive symptoms. The Cronbach's Alpha of CESD-10 was 0.75 in this study.

Adverse childhood experience

The questionnaire developed in the Kaiser-CDC study[28, 29] was aimed to assess the ACEs of participants. The 10-item scale includes three dimensions, abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual), neglect (emotional and physical), and household challenges (mother treated violently, household substance abuse, mental illness in the household, parental separation or divorce, and criminal household member). There are two options for each item: “Yes’’ and “No”. Participants would be considered to experience the adverse event if they respond “Yes”, and participants were considered to have ACE if they self-reported at least one ACE. Similarly, they were considered to have abuse, neglect, or household challenges if they self-reported at least one of them. ACE scores were acquired by accumulating the number of ACE exposure, which ranged from 0-10. In analysis, ACE scores were categorized as 0, 1, 2, 3, ≥4. The Cronbach's Alpha of ACE was 0.74 in this study.

Results

ACEs among female sexual minorities 

Table 2 displays the ACEs status of female sexual minorities. 51.5% reported at least one ACE, of which 24.6% reported one ACE, 9.6% reported two, 7.3% reported three, and 10.0% reported four or more. Among 10 ACEs, emotional abuse (22.3%) and emotional neglect (22.6%) were common adverse experiences in childhood, followed by parental separation or divorce (16.3%).

Depressive symptoms of female sexual minorities

The average score of CESD-10 was 11.60 (SD=7.35), ranging from 0 to 30. The detection rate of depressive symptoms was 56.1% Table 3 demonstrated that age (F=3.076, P=0.028), education (F=3.759, P=0.024), employment (F=5.518, P=0.004) and residence (F=5.178, P=0.002) were associated with depressive symptoms.

Associations between ACEs and depressive symptoms among female sexual minorities

Results in Table 4 reveals that lesbians exposing to ACE were inclined to experience a higher level of depressive symptoms (t=-3.684, P<0.001). Especially those individuals who experienced abuse (t=-4.732, P<0.001) and neglect (t=-5.090, P<0.001) had a higher level of depressive symptoms. Female sexual minorities with higher ACE scores were more likely to have a higher level of depressive symptoms (F=7.935, P<0.001).

Table 5 displays the results from multiple linear regression analyses controlling for demographic characteristics. The results in model 1 indicated that having ACE was positively associated with a higher level of depressive symptoms. Results in model 2 demonstrated that those minorities having any abuse or neglect experience were more likely to have depressive symptoms. Likewise, results from model 3 showed that compared with individuals who had no ACE, those with 3 ACEs and ≥4 ACEs have a higher level of depressive symptoms. In addition, results from three models indicated that compared with individuals who had part-time jobs/others, those with full-time jobs might undergo moderate depressive symptoms. Compared with individuals who lived alone, those lived with their female friends might have a lower level of depressive symptoms. Compared with those with a master's degree or above, those with a bachelor's degree usually have higher depressive symptoms.

Discussion

This study found that 51.5% of the respondents had at least one ACE, which was equal to that of MSM reported by Ding (51.4%)[30] and higher than that of the general population reported by Edwards (34.6%)[31], Lin (34.16%)[32] and Eleonora lob (24%)[33]. Among all types of ACEs, the reported rates of emotional neglect and emotional abuse among participants were higher, accounting for 22.6% and 22.3%, respectively. It was not in accordance with the findings among heterosexual women that most (20.4%) reported experiencing physical abuse ever.[34]. It was also found that 10.6% of participants reported ever suffering from sexual abuse before age 18, which is a bit higher than general Chinese women (8.9%)[35]. However, some studies conducted in the United States showed that the reporting rate of childhood sexual abuse among lesbians was 55.8% and twice as much as that of heterosexual females (26.5%)[36]. No matter among lesbians or heterosexual women, the reported prevalence of childhood sexual abuse in the United States is higher than that of Chinese women. The low proportion of sexual abuse among children in China is possibly due to Chinese traditional cultural backgrounds like Confucian culture and collectivist views[37]. Meantime, Stoltenborgh suggested that cultural values in Asia could prevent childhood sexual abuse victims from disclosing their experiences, especially when the abusers were the victims’ family members because exposing the childhood sexual abuse experience would bring shame on the family[38].

In this study, more than half of female sexual minorities (51.6%) went through depressive symptoms. Similarly, Yi found that 47.2% of Korean lesbians and 59.2% of bisexuals experienced depressive symptoms[39]. However, among general Chinese females, 33.2% reported depressive symptoms[40], which is less than that of female sexual minorities in this study. Kerr[41] and Case[42] also showed in their research that compared with heterosexual women, lesbians have a greater likelihood of depressive symptoms. As a marginal group, lesbians usually face more pressure[43] and are inclined to encounter social discrimination[44] because of their sexual orientation. Exiting studies have confirmed that sexual minority stress and experience of discrimination are gravely related to depressive symptoms and other mental health[43–45].

Multiple linear regression analysis showed that having ACE was positively associated with a higher level of depressive symptoms, which was consistent with previous studies. Chapman suggested that ACEs increase the risk of adults’ depression (this may occur in decades after ACEs) [46]. Also, Cheong reported that there was a close relationship between ACEs and depressive symptoms[47]. In three dimensions of ACE, abuse and neglect experience showed a significant correlation with a higher level of depressive symptoms. It has been reported that the adults who suffered from childhood abuse were more easily develop cognitive bias and negative self-concept and depressive symptoms as well. Lee’s study also showed that childhood emotional abuse can increase the level of depression symptoms in adulthood, and in turn lead to suicidal attempts[48]. Furthermore, this study also found that those with more ACEs have a much higher level of depressive symptoms[49]. Robert Wm Blum’s research[50] showed a similar finding that the more ACE exposures increase, the worse depressive symptoms would be. These findings suggest those female sexual minorities who had ACEs especially abuse and neglect experiences need to be paid more attention to in intervention for improving their mental health. Therefore, it is important to screen for ACEs, recognize their potential effects, and provide specific psychological support for female sexual minorities with ACEs.

Some studies have reported that there is no significant correlation between household dysfunction and mental problems such as depressive symptoms[51, 52], which probably because household dysfunction, neglect, and abuse usually coexist, and neglect and abuse have stronger effects on mental health than household dysfunction. In contrast to that, another study thought that children with family dysfunction experience may form personality characteristics such as inferiority and timidity, and so on, which render children perceive the world negatively, and then easily create depression[25, 53]. In this study, the relationship between household challenges and depressive symptoms in female sexual minorities wasn’t found. It was possible due to the small sample, also possibly because household challenges aren’t really connected with depressive symptoms. Further study with a large sample or prospective studies is needed to ascertain the relationship in the future.

Limitations

This study had several limitations. Firstly, female sexual minorities in the study were recruited by convenient sampling with the help of a lesbian organization, and the sample size was insufficient, which possibly limited the results. Secondly, the causality could not be directly determined due to the cross-sectional study design. Thirdly, ACEs and depressive symptoms of participants were collected by self-reporting recall bias and reporting bias might be introduced into this study.

Conclusions

This study suggests that female sexual minorities have a high prevalence of both ACEs and depressive symptoms, and there is a significant relationship between ACEs and depressive symptoms. It’s necessary to pay more attention to lesbians and bisexuals with ACEs to better improving their mental health.

Abbreviations

ACE: adverse childhood experiences

Declarations

Acknowledgments:

We appreciate all participants in this study for sharing their life experiences and perceptions. We would like to thank the authors for the contribution of this article and the grant of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation.

Ethics approval and Consent to participate:

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol for this research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of School of Medicine at Wuhan University. All participants informed and agreed to participate in this study.

Consent for publication:

Not applicable

Availability of data and material:

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to the confidentiality signed with respondents but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Competing interests:

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Funding:

This study was funded by the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education (grant number 15YJAZH094) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 81673196].

Authors' contributions:

All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by [Bizo Zhu], [Changmian Ding], and [Liyin Wang]. The first draft of the manuscript was written by [Bizo Zhu], [Qingqing jiang] and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements:

Thank the staff of Lespark (Beijing lesbian social organization) for their support and help to this study; Thank all respondents for their participation.

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