is a DBT-Linehan Board certified licensed psychologist and content creator (@dbtkiki) from western Massachusetts, US. She is the author of Self-Directed DBT Skills: A 3-Month DBT Workbook (2023), DBT Cards for Coping Skills (2024), and The LGBTQ+ Mental Health Workbook (2026). The group members on any given day might have included a gay man who’d had slurs blurted at him; a trans woman who worried about how her clothing choices affected her safety; a pansexual woman who painfully doubted her queerness because she was married to a man; or an intersex person who felt broken after hearing yet another politician claim ‘there are only two biological sexes’.
Although their identities and experiences differed, there was a connection. A shared understanding of the myriad ways that being LGBTQ+ in today’s world can be stressful. Indeed, most of my queer clients had experienced some form of LGBTQ+ minority stress – the unique social pressures and emotional burdens that people face due to anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice, bias and discrimination.
These clients were also creative and resilient. In that group therapy space, they collaboratively learned how to cope with the anxiety, shame and stress they experienced. As a queer person myself, I learned along with them as they shared.
If you’re queer – ie, a member of the LGBTQ+ community – minority stress could be negatively affecting your mental health, especially if you don’t know how to cope with it. In this Guide, I’ll share some of the wisdom that the group members and I found together in that space. Compared with heterosexual and cisgender people, LGBTQ+ people face particularly high rates of anxiety, depression and other mental health difficulties.
These disparities are not caused by being LGBTQ+. Rather, they’re related to living in a world that stigmatises same-gender attractions, gender-expansive expressions and queer ways of being. The minority stress model, which advanced this idea scientifically, is supported by decades of research, and queer people can benefit from learning about it.
Better understanding what LGBTQ+ stressors are, as well as how they can accumulate and affect you, can help you have more compassion for your own experience. You may have faced some, or many, of these stressors yourself: Of course, if you have more than one marginalised identity – eg, if you are also a person of colour, have a disability, or you’re a woman or a femme person – you’ve likely experienced unique and intersectional forms of these stressors. Experiencing minority stress does not doom LGBTQ+ people to perpetual mental health struggles.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
