Meet the Parents of Gay Teen Who Committed Suicide Helping To Stop the Alarming Trend

A Salt Lake City, Utah based couple, whose gay teen son committed suicide has joined in the efforts to end what’s become an increasingly alarming trend. Kids are coming out younger and younger, and also committing suicide younger and younger.

Stockton Deussen was one of those teens. He killed himself when he was 17 and now his parents wish they knew what they could have done to help him.

KSL TV: The state’s Suicide Prevention Plan is aimed at turning around the trend, and a family in North Salt Lake has made it their mission to help.  A hallway of photos memorializes a son gone far too soon.   “One of his favorite songs was, ‘You are my sunshine.’ That’s one that we chose to sing at his funeral,” Alyson Deussen said. Alyson and her husband, George Deussen, lost their son Stockton to suicide five and half years ago when he was 17 years old.  

“He was struggling with finding his place,” Alyson said. Stockton was gay.

“It kind of put him on the outside,” she said. That isolation took a heavy toll on his mental health, a struggle that is, sadly, far too common.  

LGBTQ teens are six times more likely to suffer from depression than their peers, according to a study published in Mental Health America.  

They are more than twice as likely to feel suicidal and more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual youth.   “Kids are coming out much earlier. Kids come out when they’re teenagers — on average, 15 or 16,” Joann Cook, a licensed clinical social worker with the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, said.

Cook said teens don’t have the maturity or life skills to handle the rejection and abandonment that often follows.

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