Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John E. Identity concealment affects all sexual minority individuals, with potentially complex mental health implications. Concealing a sexual minority identity can simultaneously generate the stress of hiding, protect against the stress of discrimination, and keep one apart from sexual minority communities and their norms and supports.
Not surprisingly, existing studies of the association between sexual orientation concealment and mental health problems show contradictory associationsβfrom positive to negative to null. This meta-analysis attempts to resolve these contradictions.
The association between concealment and internalizing mental health problems was larger for those studies that assessed concealment as lack of open behavior, those conducted recently, and those with younger samples; it was smaller in exclusively bisexual samples. Results extend existing theories of stigma and sexual minority mental health, suggesting potentially distinct stress processes for internalizing problems versus substance use problems, life course fluctuations in the experience of concealment, distinct experiences of concealment for bisexual individuals, and measurement recommendations for future studies.
Small overall effects, heavy reliance on cross-sectional designs, relatively few effects for substance use problems, and the necessarily coarse classification of effect moderators in this meta-analysis suggest future needed methodological advances to further understand the mental health of this still-increasingly visible population. Keywords: bisexual, depression and anxiety, sexual orientation, stigma concealment, substance use problems. From its start, the field of stigma studies has distinguished between visible and concealable stigmas in terms of the unique psychosocial challenges they pose to the stigmatized.
Experimental and observational studies show that concealing a stigma is associated with negative cognitive e. The psychosocial challenges of possessing a concealable stigma have been proposed to be an important stressor that begins early in development and partially explains the substantial disparities in mental health problems affecting sexual minorities e. Despite this plausible hypothesisβthat sexual orientation concealment should be associated with stress-sensitive mental health problemsβquantitative studies of this association have produced contradictory results.
