The National Institutes of Health ( NIH ) has awarded a $371,538 grant to Wendy Bostwick, associate professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies ( NUHS ), Public Health and Health Education programs at Northern Illinois University ( NIU ), to study the health effects of microaggressions on bisexual women.
Microaggressions are, according to the press release announcing the study, "brief, commonplace exchanges, often unintentional, that can be demeaning or degrading to someone's identity."
"Bisexual women experience a different kind of discriminationa more subtle form that accumulates over time," said Bostwick. "It's not one off-handed comment, it's constantly hearing those messages not just from strangers, but from family, friends, partners, the media and society at large. These comments might include remarks that assume a woman is confused about her identity, statements that she should just 'make up her mind' or comments that assume all bisexual women are hypersexual or promiscuous."
The study will take place over 28 days and will include 125 women from the Chicagoland area, with a specific focus on women of color. Participants will fill out a survey each day of the study with questions ranging from the microaggressions they experienced that day to substance use, moods and other queries.
Tonda Hughesprofessor and associate dean for global health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of Bostwick's collaborators on the studysaid, "This innovative study is well-positioned to help us better understand the unique stressors that contribute to physical and mental health disparities among bisexual women."
Bostwick, who's done LGBT research for 15 years, decided to conduct the current study, in part, following her work with colleagues from the University of Michigan and UIC where they looked at a large national study about health issues faced by the wider world.
The study asked people to identify their sexual orientation which most national studies don't do, Bostwick explained.
"In looking at the data we were interested in seeing what percentage of LGB people have substance abuse and/or mental health disorders and we found that there was a higher rate of substance abuse and/or mental health problems within that population," said Bostwick. "We also looked at LGB people's experiences of discrimination to see if those experiences of discrimination were associated with mental health or substance abuse disorders.
"As far as discrimination and mental-health issues we found that the bisexual population are much less likely to report lifetime experiences of discrimination. Yet our research also showed that bisexual women, in particular, have high rates of mental-health problems."
At the conclusion of this study, Bostwick said she hopes that the findings will lead to a "better understanding of the factors that are contributing to extreme mental health disparities among bisexual women. The idea is to pinpoint the risk factors for depression among a population who has epidemic levels of mental health disorders so we can prevent them from happening in the future. I don't think you can talk about prevention if you don't understand what's driving the disparities we are seeing. At the end of the study we will, hopefully, be able to provide information to therapists, doctors, social workers and substance-abuse counselors on how to intervene to correct and prevent health disparities among bisexual women."
"I also hope this work will contribute to a better understanding of the diversity within the bisexual community and a richer understanding of what the bisexual community really looks like. We still don't know nearly enough about bisexual women of color, bisexual women of low socioeconomic status or those who haven't come out as bisexual. I want this study to be the beginning of answering some of those questions."