How stress and identity strengths interact in LGBTQ+ mental health

What is it about?

LGBTQ+ people often experience mental health challenges because of stress related to stigma, rejection, and pressure to hide or question their identities. At the same time, many LGBTQ+ people develop strengths—such as pride in who they are and seeing their identity as an important part of themselves—that can support well-being. In this study, we looked at how different kinds of internal stressors (like shame, fear of being judged, or uncertainty about one’s identity) and identity-based strengths (like feeling proud of being LGBTQ+ or seeing one’s identity as meaningful) are connected to each other. Instead of treating these experiences as separate or disconnected, we used a method called network analysis to map how they interact and cluster together in real life. Using data from over 600 LGBTQ+ adults in the United States, we identified groups of related stress and resilience experiences and examined which ones were most influential within the overall system. We also explored whether these patterns differed depending on mental health symptoms (anxiety or depression) or ethnoracial identity (White vs. LGBTQ+ people of color).

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Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash

Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Most research on minority stress looks at one factor at a time or combines many experiences into single scores, which can hide how stress and resilience actually work together. Our study moves beyond that approach by showing that LGBTQ+ stress and resilience form an interconnected system, where some experiences play a much bigger role than others. We found that identity empowerment, especially feeling glad to be LGBTQ+ and seeing one’s identity as important, was strongly connected to many other positive outcomes and linked to lower levels of internalized stigma and identity-related distress. At the same time, certain stressors—such as feeling that accepting one’s identity was painful or wishing one were not LGBTQ+—acted as key “bridge” points that connected multiple difficulties together. These findings matter because they highlight specific, high-impact targets for therapy, prevention, and outreach, rather than treating all stressors as equal. The results also suggest that while LGBTQ+ people vary in mental health symptoms and racial/ethnic background, many of the core relationships between stress and resilience are shared—supporting the usefulness of these findings across diverse LGBTQ+ communities.