[Mental health of homosexual and bisexual people--review of research and presentation of phenomenon].

The issues of mental health and psychological well-being of sexual minorities have become one of the ponderable scientific questions in recent years. Not only do they attract the attention of psychiatrists, psychologists or sexologists, but also of public health professionals. It is because psychiatric disorders in sexual minorities are not only the source of individual suffering and dysfunction, but also a big and so far unappreciated social problem. The research results in this field were mostly unreliable in the past, because they were based on the false paradigm, assuming that homosexuality unquestionably belongs in the realms of psychopathology. This became a major selection bias in which researchers tried to draw conclusion upon the mental status of the hole population of homosexual people only from studies of clinical populations. New studies analyse the mental status of this relatively big social group implementing data from epidemiological population-based studies, which allows the more realistic assessment of the problem. In this work we presented new data indicating the elevated risk of psychiatric disorders within the sexual minorities. The problem was discussed in the context of living in the reluctant and hostile environment (minority stress exposure).