"Perhaps the most damaging blow to the gay teen suicide myth comes from the studies of completed suicides, in which nothing close to Gibson's 30 percent figure has been found. Keeping in mind the difficulties of assessing whether or not a deceased person was homosexual, Shaffer cites three major studies analyzing factors behind a consecutive number of youth suicides:"

[Shaffer's citations may be summarized as follows: (1) A 'psychological autopsy' of 133 teen suicides in St. Louis showed no known cases involving homosexuality; (2) A study of San Diego youth revealed only 7 percent of 'youth' suicides to be homosexual -- none under the age of 21; a study of 103 New York City youth suicides revealed only three (2.7%) involved homosexuals -- two of whom died together in a suicide pact. Shaffer commented that his findings, if anything 'ran the risk of over-determining the number of gay suicides' (Shaffer, "Teen Suicides and Gays in the Military," unpublished paper from which the New Yorker article cited above was derived, March 22, 1993. Shaffer is Irving Phillips Professor of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University.) In addition to the Shaffer studies, LaBarbera cites a 1991 survey by Gallup which also found little support for the theory that homosexuality is a prime cause of teen suicide.]