Triple jeopardy? Mental health at the intersection of gender, race, and class

► Gender, race, and class interact to affect mental health in paradoxical ways that existing theories cannot explain. ► Cultural schemas about the relative importance of the self versus others, termed self-salience, help explain the anomalies. ► Self-salience schemas are shaped by gender, race, and class and predict a wide range of mental health problems. ► Preliminary analyses of data from the United States suggest that differences in self-salience contribute to the gender, race, and class interactions in mental health problems. ► This research illustrates the importance of intersectionality in research on social stratification and mental health. ► The findings suggest that self-salience affects mental health by forming alternative, subjective status hierarchies to larger societal stratification systems.