Inaugural Issue of LGBT Health Journal Set to Appear

The inaugural issue of LGBT Health, a peer-reviewed journal for clinicians treating sexual and gender minority individuals, will be published this month in conjunction with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association meeting in Denver, September 18-21.

The journal will contain articles focused on health needs of individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), defining clinical and educational best practices, identifying ways to increase access to care, and educating users of health care services.

A free preview issue was published in July in which journal editor William Byne, M.D., Ph.D., wrote an editorial in which he called publication of the journal a landmark event for sexual and gender minority individuals and the clinicians who treat them. “This is a historical moment for LGBT health care,” Byne wrote. “Increased recognition of LGBT health disparities, together with recent progressive developments, have created an extraordinary window of opportunity to profoundly lower the barriers to health care for LGBT-identified persons, to research the most important health concerns and needs of specific LGBT populations, and to train clinicians in the best practices to meet those needs.”

The issue also includes an interview with Leonard Harvey, M.D., M.B.A., senior medical director of Aetna, Southern California, which focuses on insurance issues important for LGBT individuals. In an article titled “LGBT Persons in the Second Half of Life: The Intersectional Influences of Stigma and Cohort,” Brian de Vries, Ph.D., of San Francisco State University, reviews issues faced by aging LGBT individuals.

Psychiatrist Jack Drescher, M.D., a former chair of the APA Committee on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Issues and past president of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, said the journal will help fill a gap in knowledge. “In 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued an important report on the current state of research knowledge about LGBT health and mental health,” he told Psychiatric News. “There is a huge information gap between what we presently know and what we need to know about the health care needs of these populations. LGBT Health provides a forum for publishing new and needed research which may not necessarily be the focus of other journals.”

Drescher, a member of a subgroup that helped formulate criteria for gender dysphoria in DSM-5, also wrote an article in the preview issue titled “Controversies in Gender Diagnoses.”

The free preview issue of LGBT Health is online at http://online.liebertpub.com/toc/lgbt/1/P. ■