Lgbtq + Mental Health Essay

LGBTQ+ Mental Health Mainstream LGBTQ+ is a topic that is mainstream and has been an important topic throughout history. To look back, if you think about how far the LGBTQ community has come from, once being outlawed, being shamed, to a community that is accepting of all. However, despite all this growth and achievement in society, the LGBTQ+ community still faced much adversity, considering their mental health. Mental health has been looked down upon for many years, until these upcoming years when mental health has been taken more seriously, and more recognized, however, this is not applicable to everyone, especially to the LGBTQ+ community. This could possibly be because people in this community face discrimination. In fact, people who

The media largely does not represent the LGBTQ+ community through mass media, and even more concerning, the media will often misrepresent the community. With misrepresentation, a stigma grows towards the community, spreads false information, or even negatively portrays the LGBTQ+ community. For example “A new study published in LGBTQ Health found that frequent exposure to negative depictions of transgender people in the media was significantly associated with clinical symptoms of depression, anxiety, global psychological distress, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in this population (Feenway)”. Damaging information or misrepresentation can be detrimental to the mental health of the community. In the 1980s, when a new sexually transmitted disease was on the rise (AIDS), people began to start to blame the LGBTQ+ community, and the disease was largely labeled as a “gay disease.” With the stigma around the disease, the issue of AIDS was hardly spoken about, and even the former president, Reagen chose to not speak about the topic of AIDS, which lead to the spread of the disease, the growth of deaths around this disease, and the overall disconcert of the topic of AIDS. The negative labels put on AIDS’s disease as a “gay disease,” would shame individuals for being who they were and damage their self-image. Moreover, people would correlate being a part of the LGBTQ+ community with people who had AIDs, which is simply not true, as AIDS is a type of autoimmune disease that can affect