Advancing minority stress detection with transformers: insights from the social media datasets

Individuals from sexual and gender minority groups experience disproportionately high rates of poor health outcomes and mental disorders compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts, largely as a consequence of minority stress as described by Meyer's (Psychol Bull 129(5):674, 2003) model. This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of transformer-based architectures for detecting minority stress in online discourse. We benchmark multiple transformer models including ELECTRA, BERT, RoBERTa, and BART against traditional machine learning baselines and graph-augmented variants. We further assess zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms to assess their applicability on underrepresented datasets. Experiments are conducted on the two largest publicly available Reddit corpora for minority stress detection, comprising 12,645 and 5789 posts, and are repeated over five random seeds to ensure robustness. Our results demonstrate that integrating graph structure consistently improves detection performance across transformer-only models and that supervised fine-tuning with relational context outperforms zero and few-shot approaches. Theoretical analysis reveals that modeling social connectivity and conversational context via graph augmentation sharpens the models' ability to identify key linguistic markers such as identity concealment, internalized stigma, and calls for support, suggesting that graph-enhanced transformers offer the most reliable foundation for digital health interventions and public health policy.