Systematic Literature Review of the Recent Research on Bisexual Women and Depression

Background and Purpose:

Bisexuals are currently the largest sub-group in the LGBTQ+ community in the United States. It is also known that women make up significantly more of the bisexual population than men. However, researchers have limited knowledge specifically about bisexual women. From the small body of existing research, we do know that bisexual women have higher rates of mental health concerns when compared to both lesbian and heterosexual women. Thus this project examined the current existing research literature on bisexual women and depression. It is the first known systematic review of this topic. The research questions guiding this review were:

1. What is the current state of the research literature on bisexual women’s depression?
2. What are the mental health treatment implications for bisexual women?

Methods:

Two members of the research team independently searched three databases: social work abstracts, psycinfo, and nursing and allied health using the terms bisexual, female, depress*. The articles had to be peer-reviewed, published within the past ten years, a United States sample only, and analyzed via both gender/sex and sexual orientation.

This resulted in 40 articles being located based on the search terms and inclusion criteria. After the first review, another 18 articles were removed due to not meeting the inclusion criteria. This resulted in 22 remaining articles. The reference lists of these articles were reviewed for any missing articles that met the criteria and there were none. Three team members utilized a rating chart to independently analyze the 22 articles. The team met regularly to discuss the articles, findings, and research trends.

Results:

A primary finding is that there is a lack of current research focused solely on bisexual women and depression. Many articles were excluded from the final review because they centered on either the bisexual population and did not analyze via sex/gender, or included sexual minority women (SMW) and did not analyze via sexual identity. Within the examined literature, all were quantitative studies with similar existing data sets and scales of measurement. The overwhelming majority of samples were white, young adults, and cisgender. Most of the studies reviewed found bisexual women have more depression than heterosexual women, lesbians, and bisexual men, with a potential pattern of decreasing symptoms with age. There was an emerging pattern of black bisexual women recovering from depressive episodes quicker than their white counterparts.

Implications:

Future quantitative research should seek to sample with equal comparison groups, study bisexual women of color including immigrant women, bisexual trans women, and experiences of depression over time. Qualitative studies are greatly needed as the voices and lived experiences of bisexual women are missing from the literature.

There were calls for increased awareness on the part of mental health providers of bisexual identity, as well as increased resources and social supports for bisexual women.While the studies all call for specific mental health interventions as needed for bisexual women, none were provided.