Promoting LGBTQIA+ Mental Health: Resilience and Wellbeing beyond Minority Stress

As a scientific contribution to Pride Month, this Research Topic centers its LGBTQIA+ celebration around rigorous evidence and actionable solutions, focusing in particular on the fields of psychology and mental health. Rather than sentiment alone, we ground Pride in the psychology of resilience, joy, and community protection.Health disparities among LGBTQIA+ people are among the most persistently documented inequalities in public mental health — and among the least adequately addressed. Sexual and gender minority populations face substantially higher rates of depression, anxiety, body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and psychological distress than their cisgender heterosexual peers. These disparities have been theorized to be the consequence of several individual, social and structural factors, including psychological mechanisms linking stigma exposure to health risk factors.This Research Topic moves beyond what is already known to produce new empirical connections — how do these mechanisms operate, how do they interact, and crucially, how can their evidence be used for wellbeing? Drawing on minority stress theory, body image research, literature on eating behaviors, attachment theory, and psychodynamic frameworks, this collection prioritizes research that illuminates the intrapsychic and relational pathways linking stigma to mental health outcomes, identifies what protects and sustains resilience, and translates evidence into affirmative clinical practice and structural public health policy.Special attention is given to identities that remain underrepresented in the literature — asexual, intersex, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people — and to geographic and cultural contexts too often absent from mainstream research.Suitable themes for manuscripts include, but are not limited to:-Minority Stress & Psychological Mechanisms: Examining proximal stressors (internalized homonegativity, identity concealment, anticipatory stigma) and distal stressors (discrimination, structural exclusion) and their pathways to depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across LGBTQIA+ populations.-Body, Embodiment & Disordered Eating: Investigating how stigma, objectification, and social comparison drive body dissatisfaction and eating disorder risk, with attention to the role of vicarious trauma and minority stress in shaping physical wellbeing and media representation effects on self-concept.-Resilience, Joy & Community Protection: Exploring community belonging, identity affirmation, pride-based identity processes, and "minority joy" as protective factors that buffer against mental health harm and sustain psychological flourishing across the lifespan.-Relational Dynamics & Psychosocial Wellbeing: Analyzing attachment styles, reflective functioning, intimate partner violence, help-seeking barriers, and psychodynamic relational processes in LGBTQIA+ mental health and intimate relationships.-Evidence to Action: Culturally adapted screening and affirmative therapeutic approaches, longitudinal and qualitative research documenting lived experience and health trajectories, and structural policy evidence on anti-discrimination protections, inclusive services, and access to affirming mental healthcare — with particular focus on understudied identities (asexual, intersex, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming populations) and underrepresented geographic and cultural contexts. Topic editors: Fabrizio Santoniccolo, Luca Rollè Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81570/promoting-lgbtqia-mental-health-resilience-and-wellbeing-beyond-minority-stress