Sexual Minority Mental Health Clinicians and Professional Quality of Life
Abstract
Current ethical guidelines for mental health service providers encourage clinicians to attend to stressors that impede the clinician’s ability to provide the best quality services. However, a systemic perspective suggests that external stressors, such as sexual minority discrimination, cannot be resolved on an individual level. This study focused on sexual minority clinician (SMC) experiences of sexual minority stress in the workplace and how it impacts SMCs’ provision of mental health services. A hypothesized model of sexual minority factors—workplace heterosexism, workplace acceptance, and workplace identity concealment—assumed more rejected SMCs would experience poorer professional quality of life. SMCs were recruited through social media groups dedicated to sexual minority mental health, and accredited graduate training programs to complete a survey. Heterosexual clinicians were also recruited to complete the professional quality of life portion of the survey and provide comparison data. None of the hypotheses were found to be significant, although this is considered primarily due to low sample size. The directions of the relationships in the model suggest trends among the variables analyzed. The results suggest a need for further research and the value of a systemic perspective in conceptualizing a model of sexual minority stress in the workplace.
Degree
M.S.
Advisors
Nalbone, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Mental health|LGBTQ studies|Clinical psychology
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