Bisexual Women's Mental Health Research: A Community-based, Social Justice Approach

The goals of this paper were to review the public health literature on bisexual women’s mental health, discuss the strengths and limitations of the research and propose a social justice framework for a future research agenda. The social justice framework includes Community-Based Participatory Research and the use of an intersectional approach. The literature has found bisexual women to have higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality than heterosexual and lesbian women, indicating the public health significance of this topic. Reported protective factors of mental health for bisexual women were social support and connectedness to the lesbian gay bisexual transgender community. Risk factors were discrimination, lack of community and social support, poverty, substance use, self-harm and eating Disorders. Limitations of the research include but are not limited to inconsistent categorization of sex category and gender expression, lack of population-based random samples, and lack of longitudinal data. Current research falsely approaches bisexual women as an unstratified and monolithic community, defaulting to unmarked privileged categories. The small body of research on this topic is lacking but warrants further investigation through longitudinal and qualitative community-driven studies