What is Minority Stress and Could It Be Affecting You?
In this blog post I explore what Minority Stress is, why it’s important to be aware of it, and how it might be impacting on your mental health.
Post-lockdown and nearly three years into the COVID “experience”, everybody knows what stress feels like. However, almost from the beginning, researchers began to comment on how the epidemiological patterns of the virus reflected the fractures, cracks and differences experienced on a daily basis by folks from differing marginalised communities.
Although the data is still being analysed, the virus seems to have disproportionately and negatively impacted the health needs of Black and Migrant communities, amplifying structural inequalities that were already there.
LGTBQ+ people were also impacted in terms of access to services and increased isolation and disabled people were hit hard by the pandemic with multiple impacts on physical and psychological wellbeing.
If you came from more than one of these communities and happened to identify as a woman or girl the stresses and impacts seemed to be at their most intense and destructive. We also need to hold in mind the ongoing mental health crisis faced by many men, which COVID swung through like a wrecking ball, and the emerging impact lockdown has had on the mental health of children and young people.
What this suggests is that although we all experience stress, our social location can add many layers on top of this core experience.
The Minority Stress thesis argues that the multiple experiences of prolonged stress faced by members of marginalised or stigmatized minority groups shows up disproportionately, and in measurable ways, via health data such as high blood pressure, heart problems, mortality rates and mental health issues.
This stress also arises from poor social support, low socioeconomic status alongside interpersonal and institutional prejudice and discrimination. The Minority Stress thesis was first discussed in relation to Gay men and their experiences of the HIV/AIDS crisis, (Meyer, 1995), but was then found to be useful when applied to other minoritised communities too.
Two particular types of stress are in the mix here as outlined by Bristow and Waters (2016):
Distal Stressors – actual abuse or prejudice and
Proximal Stressors – expected stigma, internalised homo/transphobia (and/or racism and/or misogyny and sexism, and/or ableism) and feeling targeted in the wider culture by being a member of a minority group or groups.
What this means is that ”people can be affected by discrimination without any direct experience of it” and these experiences can be unique to minority populations, chronic in nature, and amplified by social processes, institutions and structures.
A good example of this is the current moral panic around trans and non-binary identities where the hostile public discourse and violence towards trans and gender non-conforming folks in the US and UK (the distal stressor) is internalised (and resisted) by members of that community, leading to understandably higher levels of vigilance to threat or danger both from within and outside the LGBTQ+ community (the proximal stressor,) which in turn impacts on mental health. These same processes are at work in all of the marginalised communities I mentioned above and are rooted in what therapist and author Dr Alex Iantaffi refers to as the settler-colonial mentality that shaped the society we live in with all of its cultural and historical traumas.
When someone shows up in therapy, all of this will be held in their body, thoughts, feelings and behaviours and they may not be completely aware of it. The work will involve exploring these dimensions of distress and how to safely resist and process them.
In my clinical practice clients will regularly describe “not feeling right,” “not feeling happy,” or “feeling stressed and panicky all the time but I don’t know why….” They may be experiencing aches and pains that seem to come and go for no reason or be feeling generally disconnected and lonely. When these themes show up, it’s a clue for me to ask questions in a trauma-informed way about the person’s lived experience, identity and history. It also means widening the “lens” of cognitive behavioural therapy to think about what Dr Brendan Dunlop (author of The Queer Mental Health Workbook) calls the “Circles of Influence and the Circles of Closeness” along with sociocultural factors such as (dis)ability, culture, class, race, gender, ancestral trauma, neurodiversity, health and work.
These circles of influence can include family and friends, schools and other institutions such as Church or Temple, community interactions, the socio-political environment as well as the digital environment (social media, dating apps trolling, and unmediated and unregulated sources of information such as YouTube.)
If our circles of closeness are not well populated to buffet us, all of these influences can isolate us and undermine resilience as we navigate issues - such as societal expectations, coming out in all its variations, legal status, family rejection, violence and abuse, ageing/bodily changes - within the context of oppression, shame, loss, patriarchal White supremacy, heteronormativity transphobia, ableism and so on, all pouring into and overflowing our stress “buckets.”
Clinical Psychologist Walt Odets explores this complexity beautifully in his book “Out of the Shadows – The Psychology of Gay Men’s Lives.” He writes how psychiatry (and psychology, especially behavioural psychology, which has its own troubling history with regards to aversion and conversion therapy) historically has pathologized and individualised the distress of various minority communities in relation to the majority culture as follows:
“troubling feelings suggest the need for help, needing help looks like pathological weakness and personal failure and weakness and failure validate the stigma….
Members of minorities who are also survivors of trauma often experience troubling feelings, and how could they not? This assertion is not a confirmation of pathology or weakness: it is an acknowledgment of the truth about normal human responses to adversity….
Authentic strength lies in our own thoughtful attention to our vulnerabilities, not our denial of them….” (p.148)
In therapy then, it's important for us to be able to bring awareness to our vulnerabilities in this wider framework (What’s your story? What happened to you? How did it affect you?) as well as our individual and collective resilience (What did you have to do to survive? What are your strengths?) in order to imagine and create new meanings and new stories (What happens next?) Stories that decentre pathologizing majority culture attitudes and beliefs (including some forms of psychotherapy and counselling,) and place our own stories and creative experiences of multiplicity, marginalization, and power at the centre of our recovery, healing and liberation.
If this sounds like an area you’d be interested in exploring, why not contact us at Rhizome Practice to see how we could help be part of that process alongside you.
