Our contribution to science
In May 2025, we participated in the Bujas Days with a poster presentation entitled The association of depressive symptoms with potentially traumatic experiences during adolescence. A latent class analysis we conducted on participants in the eleventh wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) from 2023 showed that about 12% of participants experience depressive symptoms a significant portion of the time. Subsequent analyses found that these symptoms were associated with potentially traumatic experiences that occurred during the participant's adolescence.
Find out more on this link.
In October 2025, we participated in Psihošpancir with a presentation entitled From Minority Stress through Limited Resources to Reduced Well-Being: An Example from the LGBTQ+ Community. In this presentation, we summarized the results of an analysis conducted on data that we collected independently. Based on these analyses, we also wrote a scientific paper that was published in January 2026.
Find out more on this link.
You can find details about our research and analytical approach by clicking on the icon next to this text. :)
Key findings of the study (N = 358):
Croatian context: LGBTQ+ participants in our sample report significantly higher levels of stress, lower life satisfaction, and more frequent depressive symptoms compared to cisgender heterosexual individuals (even when compared to studies conducted with nationally representative samples, e.g., the general sample and the youth sample from the European Social Survey, wave 11).
Full mediation: Results showed that the difference in mental health and well-being between LGBTQ+ individuals and heterosexual cisgender individuals reflects differences in structural stigma (e.g., belief that one will have or adopt children), experienced stigma (e.g., frequency of verbal or physical aggression or discrimination experienced), and expectation of discrimination (e.g., expectation that one will be abused or targeted), three dimensions of minority stress (which we can all experience). When LGBTQ+ individuals and cisgender heterosexual individuals are matched with respect to these factors, the differences in well-being and mental health disappear.
Limitations of "working on yourself": Although self-compassion is useful, it has been shown to be only a partial mediator of the relationship between minority stress and well-being. In other words, an individual's inner strength and resilience do not show the potential to fully compensate for the damage caused by minority stress.
These findings confirm that the mental health of LGBTQ+ people is inseparable from the social context. Instead of shifting the responsibility for mental health and well-being solely to the individual and their "resilience", this research, as well as numerous other (including experimental) studies, shows that pretending that the environment is not related to the mental health and well-being of the individual is by no means justified.
In January 2026, our paper Minority Stress and Mental Health: The Role of Self-Compassion was published in the journal Društvena istraživanja.
What did we research? Through the theory of minority stress, we wanted to test whether the lower level of mental health and well-being (defined as lower life satisfaction and higher presence of depressive symptoms) in LGBTQ+ people is a result of their orientation/identity or the specific stress they are exposed to due to the social context. We also examined whether self-compassion can protect people from minority stress.
