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Abstract
While suicide is a major public health issue in the general population, sexual minority populations experience disproportionately high rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This disparity is often theorized as being related to their vulnerability to risk factors affecting the general population, such as exposure to traumatic events, as well as unique risk factors, like heterosexist discrimination. Further, sexual minority are overrepresented among survivors of the types of interpersonal traumas most associated suicidality, such as childhood maltreatment and intimate partner violence. Finally, the identified mechanisms linking exposure to traumatic events and suicidality align with the symptomatology of complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), which is most common among survivors of chronic or repeated interpersonal traumatic events. However, no studies to date have explored the interactions between exposure to traumatic events and discrimination as risk factors for suicidality among sexual minority populations from a mixed methods approach. Therefore, the purpose of the proposed study was to explore the influence of exposure to trauma, traumatic stress, and discrimination on suicidality among sexual minority people from an ecological systemic framework. This was done in three parts: (1) a secondary analysis of a nationally representative dataset to examine the potential for CPTSD to account for associations between exposure to traumatic events, discrimination, and suicidality; (2) hermeneutic phenomenological data collection and analysis to explore the lived experience of sexual minority woman-identifying people; and (3) the comparison of quantitative and qualitative results to explore areas of convergence and divergence to develop meta-inferences to inform clinical and policy implications. Results suggest that discrimination and exposure to traumatic events are associated with shared risk factors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and that CPTSD should be considered an important target for suicide prevention among sexual minority populations. Future research should explore the potential for individual and relational treatments for CPTSD to reduce suicide risk among LGBTQ+ populations.