The queer community is one of the highest risk groups for depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. For decades, many scientists wrongly assumed that LGBTQ+ people were inherently pathological, and therefore at greater risk for mental disorder. Shortly after research based on actual surveys of LGBTQ+ people first began in the late 1990s, discrimination and stigma were revealed to be the primary detriments to LGBTQ+ mental health. Though we certainly still have a ways to go, the queer community has since gained a measure of social acceptance. Now, some LGBTQ+ mental health researchers are shifting their focus to stress that comes from within the community itself.

“Up until now, almost all studies into LGBTQ+ mental health have looked at stigma-related stressors — things like family rejection, rejection from your religious community, or being bullied,” says John Pachankis, PhD, associate professor of Public Health and director of the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative at Yale University. But what Pachankis and his colleagues began to notice in their work was that gay and bisexual men reported feeling much of their stress coming from their peers, or what a new study led by Pachankis calls intra-minority stress. Published in January in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study was conducted over five years with representative samples of participants from across the U.S. and is the most significant of its kind to examine community stressors among gay and bisexual men.

Its findings reveal what many in the community know all too well: that gay and bisexual men can be pretty harsh with each other and with ourselves in trying to measure up. Participants reported feeling stressed by what they perceived as the community’s obsession with looks, status, and sex; they pointed to its exclusionary racism and social cattiness. “We know that men in general are more competitive, and that masculine-related competition is stressful,” Pachankis says. “What these data show is that when that type of competition happens in a community made up of men that both socializes and sexualizes with each other, the toll on one's mental health can be pretty steep.”

them. spoke to Pachankis about the leading stressors that originate within the community, their effects on mental and physical health, and how gay and bisexual men might better support each other and venture to move forward together.

What were the major pressures you found affecting the mental health of gay and bisexual men?

The stressors we heard in interviews and then studied nationwide could be classified into four types. One was stress related to perceiving that the gay community is overly focused on sex at the expense of long-term relationships or friendships. The second was that the gay community is overly focused on status-related concerns, things like masculinity, attractiveness, and wealth. The third was related to perceptions that the gay community is overly competitive, that it upholds this kind of shade culture and general social competition. The fourth was that the gay community is exclusionary of diversity, including racial-ethnic diversity and age-diversity, and discriminatory towards gay men with HIV.

The research finds that each of these classes of stressors is associated with depression and anxiety. But some likely have a distinct impact depending on where a gay or bisexual man falls along the status-based pecking order that a lot of people talked about perceiving as a cause of stress. To the extent that we know ourselves through the reflection of others, what we find is that gay and bisexual men might be particularly likely to size themselves up using the same standards of attractiveness and success and masculinity that they use to size up their potential sex partners, which can be particularly painful.