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Updated: Dec 8, 2025

The Social Dimension of Stress: Experimental Manipulations of Social Support and Social Identity in the Trier Social Stress Test
Published on: November 19, 2015
The Language of LGBTQ+ Minority Stress Experiences on Social Media
Koustuv Saha1, Sang Chan Kim1, Manikanta D Reddy1
1Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Abstract:
LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) individuals are at significantly higher risk for mental health challenges than the general population. Social media and online communities provide avenues for LGBTQ+ individuals to have safe, candid, semi-anonymous discussions about their struggles and experiences. We study minority stress through the language of disclosures and self-experiences on the r/lgbt Reddit community. Drawing on Meyer's minority stress theory, and adopting a combined qualitative and computational approach, we make three primary contributions, 1) a theoretically grounded codebook to identify minority stressors across three types of minority stress-prejudice events, perceived stigma, and internalized LGBTphobia, 2) a machine learning classifier to scalably identify social media posts describing minority stress experiences, that achieves an AUC of 0.80, and 3) a lexicon of linguistic markers, along with their contextualization in the minority stress theory. Our results bear implications to influence public health policy and contribute to improving knowledge relating to the mental health disparities of LGBTQ+ populations. We also discuss the potential of our approach to enable designing online tools sensitive to the needs of LGBTQ+ individuals.
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