Because group-specific stressors and general psychological processes have been considered distinct risk factors for psychopathology, public health and clinical interventions have focused on targeting these risk factors separately. One of the contributions offered by the psychological mediation framework is that these factors are interrelated and mutually reinforcing, suggesting the importance of joint interventions. Because general psychological processes are set in motion by stigma-related stressors, focusing on altering these processes at the individual level may not gain much traction therapeutically if changes at the social level are not also made in tandem. For example, even if an intervention is initially effective at decreasing an individual’s use of rumination in response to stigma events, the framework suggests that the individual will re-engage in rumination if the social circumstances that created this response are not altered. These interrelationships indicate that disparities in psychiatric morbidity among sexual minorities are likely to persist without joint interventions targeting both intraindividual psychological processes as well as stressors generated at the social/structural level.
