Examining Longitudinal Risk and Strengths-Based Factors Associated with Depression Symptoms Among Sexual Minority Men in Canada

TL;DR

This study explores factors that contribute to or protect against depression in Canadian men who identify as sexual minorities, highlighting the importance of social support and self-esteem.

Contribution

The study is the first to separately analyze within-person and between-person effects of risk and strengths-based factors on depression in sexual minority men.

Findings

Higher childhood physical abuse and internalized homonegativity are linked to increased depression symptoms.

Self-esteem, social support, and hope are associated with lower depression symptoms.

Social support reduces the impact of heterosexist discrimination on depression.

Abstract

Sexual minority men (SMM) experience anti-SMM stressors and have elevated rates of mental health issues compared to heterosexual men, such as depression. Importantly, strengths-based factors may directly increase wellbeing and provide a buffer against the detrimental effects of such stressors. In the present study, we integrated risk and strengths-based models to examine predictors of depression symptoms in a sample of 465 Canadian SMM across three time points using multilevel modeling. Higher scores on a measure of childhood physical abuse at baseline, and greater within-person (i.e., deviation from individual’s average) and between-person (i.e., deviation from group average) internalized homonegativity and heterosexist discrimination were associated with higher depression scores. Higher within- and between-person scores on measures of self-esteem, social support, and hope were associated with lower depression scores. Social support buffered the effects of between-person heterosexist discrimination on depression symptoms: at mean and high levels of social support, heterosexist discrimination was not associated with depression symptoms. This is the first study to disaggregate between-person and within-person effects of both risk factors and strengths-based factors among SMM, which has critical importance for the development of tailored individual-level interventions that target internalized homonegativity, hope, social support, and self-esteem to alleviate symptoms of depression among SMM.

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