Adolescents with gender dysphoria are more likely to have psychiatric problems - and gender reassignment medical treatments tend to make things worse, not better – results of an extensive, decades-long, peer reviewed study in Finland reveal.
The study, published in the April edition of Acta Paediatrica, a monthly journal for pediatric medicine, examined the prevalence of severe psychiatric morbidity among adolescents and young adults referred between 1996 and 2019 to Finland’s Gender Identity Services and how that that prevalence changed in the years after receiving treatment.
The findings refute claims that medical gender reassignment improves mental health, the study reports:
“This does not support the suggested improvement in mental health after medical [gender reassignment] initiated during developmental years, and in light of the present findings, severe psychiatric disorders do not appear primarily attributable to (gender dysphoria).”
Overall, the need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment was found to be three times more common, as well as more intense, among referred gender dysphoric youth than among adolescents in the control group.
Following referral to gender identity services, adolescents became even more likely to need psychiatric treatment and four times more likely than the control group to have severe psychological problems.
Contrary to claims that gender reassignment medical treatment is essential to the mental health of gender dysphoric youth, psychiatric morbidity became more common after referral to gender identity services, the study found:
“The gender-referred adolescents had a 5- to 6-fold increased need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment two years or more after the index [first appointment] date compared to the male controls, and 3- to 4-fold greater risk compared to the female controls, regardless of the desired direction of change and GR (gender reassignment) status.”
Even worse, in some cases, medical gender reassignment actually “appears to be linked to deterioration in mental health,” the study found.
Gender transition in Finland is publicly funded through the country’s socialized medicine system.
Post-transition psychiatric treatment is not covered, however.
