Study: mental health risks increase after youth trans treatments
A new Finnish study has found that mental health problems “increased markedly” amongst young people who underwent medical treatment to change gender – with a 6-fold rise in psychiatric morbidity in one cohort.
And it found that the psychiatric needs of adolescents who present questioning their gender did not subside after medical gender reassignment.
“The need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment increased considerably in follow-up among those who underwent medical gender reassignment,” the long-term study found.
The findings have been highlighted by critics of “gender-affirming care”, who have long been critical of an unquestioning approach to social, medical and surgical interventions for patients, including adolescents, who present with gender dysphoria – and who have called for increased scrutiny for harmful outcomes.
The researchers said that the adolescents “had markedly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls before and after referral” – and that the study found treatment needs “often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions”.
And they warned that for some adolescents the transgender medical interventions “might even have a negative impact”. The “findings emphasise the need for thorough psychiatric assessment and ongoing treatment throughout medical gender reassignment,” they said.
The study found that that adolescents who underwent medical treatment to change sex saw a marked increase in psychiatric morbidity – the prevalence of mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders.
Researchers saw mental health problems after gender reassignment increasing 6-fold, rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in the cohort of young people who sought to become female – while the cohort who sought to become male also saw psychiatric issues more than double from being present 21.6% of the time to a prevalence of 54.5% after reassignment treatments.
“Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment,” the study found.
And it noted: “After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.”
“Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals,” the study concluded. “Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.”
LONG-TERM, REGISTER-BASED STUDY
The study, ‘Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019’ used a nationwide cohort of all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019, involving 2,083 patients and 16,643 matched controls in a long-term register-based follow-up study
Researchers said that gender-referred adolescents, regardless of their gender, had significantly more psychiatric morbidity than their matched population controls – and that those referred after 2010 displayed noticeably more psychiatric morbidity than those referred earlier.
Speaking to GB News, Dr Dionne Joseph, a chartered Clinical Psychologist, said that the “robust” Finnish study was the “evidence needed” to show that “gender affirming care is a disaster”.
She said that the evidence was “incontrovertible” that the mental health of young people were made “considerably worse” by gender-affirming care which included surgeries such as phalloplasties (construction of penis) and other interventions. There was a “disastrous decline” in their mental health and functioning, she said.
She said that parents had been lied to and told that gender reassignment would address suicidality in adolescents.
In the study’s conclusion, researchers wrote that: “Actually, considerable increases in need for psychiatric treatment were seen among those adolescents who had undergone medical GR[gender reassignment], particularly among those seeking change toward female.”
“Oestrogen has been found to potentially cause depressive symptoms in both cisgender women and transwomen , which may partly explain the increases in psychiatric needs among those who underwent feminising GR,” the study found.
“Masculinising hormones may temporarily improve mood, and testosterone-related bodily changes—typically emerging within a few months —could be expected to alleviate GD and subsequently psychiatric treatment needs. However, psychiatric treatment needs were also markedly increased among those who obtained masculinising GR. Subsequent morbidity burden may also arise from treatments not meeting the expectations placed on them.”
Earlier this year, the author of the Cass Review, Baroness Hilary Cass said that social media has misled children into thinking they are transgender.
The author of the Cass review said some children felt they did not fit the gender stereotypes they saw online and concluded they must be trans, The Telegraph reported.
Lady Cass’s 2024 inquiry into NHS gender care for under-18s led to sweeping changes including a ban on puberty blockers.
Lady Cass told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I think children and young people were being given a narrative that it’s not OK to be anything but absolutely typical of the other girls on Instagram.
“I think what has misled children is the belief that if you are not a typical girl, if you like playing with trucks, or boys who like dressing up or that you have same-sex attraction, that means that you’re trans.
“And actually it’s not like that… Those are all normal variations”.
