Qualitative accounts of community health workers providing and shaping mental health support in climate-vulnerable communities in Bangladesh.

The concept of minority stress was introduced Dr. Winn Kelly Brooks (formerly Virginia Rae Brooks) in her 1981 work Minority Stress and Lesbian Women. Instead of seeing the struggles of queer women as signs of mental illness, she believed these problems arose out of social inequities []. Dr. Ilan H. Meyer would apply this idea to gay men, developing it into a model linking internal and external stressors to negative mental health outcomes []. Researchers Hendricks and Testa would adapt the model to the trans and gender-diverse community. They identified gender-specific stressors such as rejection, non-affirmation, and internalized transphobia linked to poorer mental health, as well as buffering factors like gender identity pride and family support []. Based in phenomenological philosophy, queer phenomenology is a way to understand how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals experience sex and gender differently as they move through the world []. It draws from the work of Edmund Husserl, who believed individual meaning and value arise from personal experience []. Psychiatrist Karl Jaspers applied this approach to psychiatry, using it to explore inner worlds shaped by psychological distress. Instead of just focusing on symptoms or brain chemistry, Jaspers turned his attention instead to the lived experiences of his patients []. The thread connecting these phenomenological approaches is a commitment to witnessing rather than judging. Sara Ahmed suggests social spaces are organized around cisheteronormative assumptions. They expect individuals to follow specific paths based on those assumptions []. Examples of this might include adopting pronouns and/or gendered behaviors based on one’s assigned sex. But, when someone moves in a direction different, their existence reveals how rigid those paths really are. Identities and expressions that don’t align with normative expectations clash with systems and infrastructures that are restrictive at best, exclusive at worst. Not fitting can make a person “feel odd, even disturbed” (pp. 170) and cause a sense of disruption to their life-world. Within the queer phenomenological framework, not fitting becomes evidence of the confines of cisnormativity, not personal failure.