Study of Psychological Distress among Sexual and Gender Minorities and Cishet Young Adults of India and United States of America

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Mr. Vanshaj Gandhi, Dr. Kamini C. Tanwar

Abstract

Thedecriminalisation of homosexuality on September 6, 2018 in India has led to focus of Indian researchers towards mental health of Sexual and Gender Minorities (SGMs) who face day-to-day challenges such as social-unacceptance, identity under-expression,discrimination and hate crimes. The present study focuses onanalysing psychological distress among one of the most developed country i.e. United States of America (US) and the fast-developing country i.e. India with the inclusion of the LGBTQ+ and Cishet population. To fulfil the objective, data was collected from 200 young adults falling under 18-40 years of age from both Indians (N=100) and Americans (N= 100) through Purposive Sampling Technique. Furthermore, there were 50 LGBTQ+ and 50 Cishet sample inboth group of each country. The responses were collected through SurveyMonkey. Every respondent was individually assessed using Kessler’s Psychological Distress Scale (K10; Kessler et al.,2002) for evaluating the extent of psychological distress in the individual.The data analysis was done by Independent sample t-test using IBM SPSS software.The results indicate that 1.) Young adults of India have higher psychological distress than that of Americansas well as both the group (LGBTQ+ and Cishet Population) of India have higher psychological distress than that of the US;2) LGBTQ+ population has higher psychological distress in comparison to Cishet population in both India and US as well as for young adults.

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