Intersections of race, gender, and sexual identity attributions toward discrimination and mental health across three cohorts of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults.

Discrimination is a risk factor for compromised mental health among sexually diverse people. However, few studies examine the implications of experiencing discrimination tied to multiple identities for sexually diverse adults' prospective mental health. This study takes an intersectional perspective to investigate how attributing discrimination to multiple identities is related to psychological distress over 2 years. Differences by age cohorts are also examined. Three intersectional hypotheses were tested: the additive hypothesis (i.e., multiple forms of discrimination incrementally worsen mental health), the inuring hypothesis (i.e., discrimination does not worsen mental health beyond one form), and the multiplicative hypothesis (e.g., experiencing two forms of discrimination worsen mental health twice as much as one form). Discrimination and attributions to discrimination were independently associated with baseline psychological distress, supporting the additive hypothesis, whereas the multiplicative hypothesis was supported for changes in psychological distress. Results from this study provide novel information about prospective associations between multiple attributions to discrimination and mental health for sexually diverse adults.