11pt”>Next, I think readers should consider a statement made in 2018 by the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, the UK’s main centre of treatment for gender-variant children:
'Suicidality in young people attending the GIDS is similar to that of young people referred to child and adolescent mental health services. It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition.'
A third data point comes from a High Court judgement made earlier this month. It concerned the Tavistock clinic’s use of puberty-blocking medication on children who experience trouble over their gender. The Tavistock lost the case, as the judges decided children could not give informed consent to such treatment, the use of which has now been halted by NHS England.
During the case, the Tavistock submitted to the court an interim paper arising from its study of children who received 'early pubertal suppression'. According to the court judgment, the Tavistock paper found that 'there was no overall improvement in mood or psychological wellbeing using standardised psychological measures.'
In summary, the country’s leading suicide prevention charity tells journalists not to 'normalise' suicide, especially among young people, by presenting it as an understandable or inevitable response to crisis. The country’s leading medical authority on transgender young people says they are not at unusual risk of suicide, and called suggestions to the contrary unhelpful. The same clinic’s evidence shows that the use of puberty blocking medication does not improve the mental health of trans children.
Now that I’ve loaded you down with that context, dear reader, consider how the BBC this week reported on that court ruling and its implications for children with gender issues.
In conclusion:
Here, I offer another summary: the BBC reported that 'doctors' say a court ruling halting the use of puberty blockers could 'cause' children to commit suicide, on the basis of unevidenced assertions from a non-specialist medic and disgraced doctors who make money selling such drugs. It did so without reporting the views of actual experts that such narratives about suicide are misleading and potentially harmful.
There are several other things I could say about that BBC report, but I’m not going to say them here. Instead, I’ll end this article with another quote from that Samaritans guidance, which should be considered vital context for that awful, awful article from the BBC about vulnerable children:
'….there is strong and consistent research evidence that some forms of news reporting lead to increases in suicide rates. Media coverage can influence how people behave in a crisis and their beliefs about the options open to them….
'Young people are a particularly vulnerable audience in relation to media coverage of suicide. They are more susceptible to imitational suicidal behaviour and more likely to be influenced by the media than other age groups.'
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