Black gays, lesbians mentally healthier than whites

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Black lesbians, gay men and bisexuals are less likely to suffer from mental disorders than their white or Latino counterparts, a new study shows.

The findings call into question the "double jeopardy" theory, which argues that black homosexuals would actually be at greater risk of such problems due to suffering both racial discrimination and homophobia.

"It doesn't seem to confirm those social stress theories," Dr. Ilan H. Meyer of Columbia University in New York City, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health. Perhaps, he suggested, black individuals who are homosexual have dealt with racial discrimination from an early age, and have thus developed healthier ways of coping with discrimination based on sexual orientation later in life.

Meyer and his team sought to better understand the prevalence of mental disorders and suicide attempts among homosexual individuals based on ethnicity by surveying 388 lesbian, gay and bisexual people who identified themselves as black, white or Latino.

Latino and white study participants had a similar prevalence of mental disorders, but blacks had significantly less. This mirrors the general population, Meyer noted, in which blacks overall are less likely to have mental health problems than whites.

However, black and Latino study participants were more likely than whites to have attempted suicide. Such suicide attempts may have been more closely related to stress and trauma surrounding coming out -- attempts were made, on average, when individuals were 17.5 years old -- than underlying mental health problems, Meyers suggests.

"A lot of blacks and Latinos did report all kinds of events that surrounded their coming out," he noted, for example being kicked out of the house and rejected by their families.

On a more positive note, the researchers had hypothesized that younger study participants would be less likely to have mental disorders than older people given that they grew up in a generally more tolerant environment, and this was indeed the case.

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, November 2007.