ArticleSocial psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology2022
Increased risks for mental disorders among LGB individuals: cross-national evidence from the World Mental Health Surveys.
Article in Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
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- Primary care experiences at the intersection of sexual minority status and long-term mental health conditions in England: a cross-sectional analysis using the English General Practice Patient Survey.EClinicalMedicine · 2026Article
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- Striving for LGBTQI+ Health Equity in Arthroplasty.Arthroplasty today · 2026Article
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- Capacity needs of Pakistani psychiatrists to deliver community-sensitive mental health services to sexual minority men.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Distribution of mental health diagnoses in relation to sexual orientation and gender discontent in a late adolescent community population.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- Chemsex: Quiet revolution with loud risks.Indian journal of psychiatry · 2025Article
- New Model, Old Risks? Sociodemographic Bias and Adversarial Hallucinations Vulnerability in GPT-5.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Mental health and its drivers in lesbian, bisexual and queer-identifying women at a South African higher education institution: a qualitative study.BMC global and public health · 2025Article
- Mental health disorders, childhood adversities, and recent stressors as risk factors for non-suicidal self-injury, and suicidality among LGBTQA + higher education students.BMC public health · 2025Article
- A Cross-Cultural Study of Social Support from Family, Friends, and Significant Others and Mental Health Among Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Gay and Lesbian Young Adults.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Sexual Orientation and Personality Dimensions Measured by the Junior Temperament and Character Inventory among Adolescents.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Mental disorders and sexual orientation in college students across 13 countries of differing levels of LGBTQ+ acceptance.Journal of psychiatric research · 2025Article
- Sociodemographic biases in medical decision making by large language models.Nature medicine · 2025Article
- Cultural safety, the LGBTQI+ community and international medical graduate training.The Medical journal of Australia · 2025Article
- LLM-Guided Pain Management: Examining Socio-Demographic Gaps in Cancer vs non-Cancer cases.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Oral Health Equity for Global LGBTQ+ Communities: A Call for Urgent Action.International dental journal · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
23 authors at 20 institutions in 15 countries.
Funding
Abstract
purposeLesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals, and LB women specifically, have an increased risk for psychiatric morbidity, theorized to result from stigma-based discrimination. To date, no study has investigated the mental health disparities between LGB and heterosexual AQ1individuals in a large cross-national population-based comparison. The current study addresses this gap by examining differences between LGB and heterosexual participants in 13 cross-national surveys, and by exploring whether these disparities were associated with country-level LGBT acceptance. Since lower social support has been suggested as a mediator of sexual orientation-based differences in psychiatric morbidity, our secondary aim was to examine whether mental health disparities were partially explained by general social support from family and friends.
methodsTwelve-month prevalence of DSM-IV anxiety, mood, eating, disruptive behavior, and substance disorders was assessed with the WHO Composite International Diagnostic Interview in a general population sample across 13 countries as part of the World Mental Health Surveys. Participants were 46,889 adults (19,887 males; 807 LGB-identified).
resultsMale and female LGB participants were more likely to report any 12-month disorder (OR 2.2, p < 0.001 and OR 2.7, p < 0.001, respectively) and most individual disorders than heterosexual participants. We found no evidence for an association between country-level LGBT acceptance and rates of psychiatric morbidity between LGB and heterosexualAQ2 participants. However, among LB women, the increased risk for mental disorders was partially explained by lower general openness with family, although most of the increased risk remained unexplained.
conclusionThese results provide cross-national evidence for an association between sexual minority status and psychiatric morbidity, and highlight that for women, but not men, this association was partially mediated by perceived openness with family. Future research into individual-level and cross-national sexual minority stressors is needed.
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