NHS funding £3mil to site promoting trans to children

Yes, 500% profit is a huge margin.

So Kooth is a commercial enterprise which gets £3million from the NHS and retains £2.5millon of that as profit?

And on this thread we have someone claiming to have detailed knowledge of what happens on every shift operated by this commercial enterprise and also claiming that teen deaths would have been 25% higher over a period of two decades without this commercial enterprise’s activities.

That could answer SinnerBoy’s question about why that poster is ignoring the harms.

Kooth makes money for its investors, so it'll be seen as a success. "post-tax profits of £2.5million last year."

EnidBlytonne · 22/03/2024 00:34

The footer on one of their emails to schools. (Click to read the whole thing)

I'm an unsurprised that they boast of being supported by BACP. I'm a bit stumped by Lemon's claims and that they seem to be ignoring the information about the harm they've done, by recommending children to organisations which promote breast binding and the like, as well as the terrible anorexia "advice."

Perhaps they do provide some good services, but the trans and anorexia services are far from good and in fact, actively destructive.

Teens need taking away from ruminating on mental health and looking inwards, not hiring more and more unqualified do gooders to make more teens feel worse about their problems. Thus driving more funding to these things and not to other activities that take teens away from the rumination.

The more funding you throw at this the more funding you will have to keep throwing at it.

How do you have access to that level of detail of what happens “on every shift conducted by the team”?

One would have to be an employee of Kooth or a Director of Kooth to have access to that level of detail.

This is yet another example of how this ideology breaks organisations. Kooth should be supporting children to understand that for the vast majority, their discomfort with their growing bodies can be supported and will be resolved as they mature. Instead they ignore their safeguarding responsibilities and push children in the direction of the dubious groups promoting breast binders and puberty blockers.

Children's safety should be the priority - not the political demands from trans activist groups. Yet every time the activists win over the needs of children.

Cannot tell you how many times Kooth has been pushed/recommended/urged on me for troubled DD. It's terrifying to think how much danger our children are in from the professionals who should be supporting them.

Kooth works with young people who use the one to one counselling service - around 30% present with high distress levels and suicidal ideation appears on every shift conducted by the team. 200 young people take their own lives but many more than that think about it, sadly.

So you are saying that Kooth prevents 50 teen suicides a year? (1000 over 20 years = 500 over 10 years = 50 a year.)

So, if there are 200 teen suicide a year as per a PP’s data, then according to you, teen suicides would be 25% higher every year without Kooth?

If they could evidence that claim, surely there’d be a peer reviewed study into their success.

I’ve had a look at their website, it says it’s site for teens to “access support from other young people and professionals” and the site’s recommendations include: a coping box, a good mood playlist, and journaling.

Yes, 20 years sounds much more realistic. And it would be such a terrible shame to lay waste to 20 years of good work. But the experience of so many other organisations so far - from Stonewall to GIDS to Rape Crisis - is that it has been impossible to get the ideology out of the service even when it has been damaging the people it's supposed to be helping.

So I hope it's easier for Kooth - a signpost to other services can be changed fairly easily, after all! - and I hope it can continue to do its good work.

I am talking about 20 years, which is how long Kooth has been around.

I am talking about a 20 year period which is how old Kooth is.

I agree that promoting gender idealogy is not healthy or helpful and I hope they will learn from that.

That is simply not true. They have not 'taken a lot of babies' with them. They talk to young people seven days a week, 365 days a year and do stellar work around risk, self-harm, suicidal ideation as well as less extreme presentations.

cahms is the NHS branch for mental heath, the ‘help’ for children who are suicidal from cahms just isnt there due to lack of funding

A service which provides early help to the most vulnerable children and young people should be the most extremely cautious in what it promotes to them. Kooth has in effect been promoting transition to many of the most vulnerable children in the country. That makes it dangerous.

And when innovation is doing something dangerous it is supposed to stop the dangerous practice and act more safely. If it doesn't then it gets penalised or shut down. This is scrutiny and accountability.

As for saving the lives of "thousands" of teenagers who would not be here without it - the Papyrus Suicide Trust (which I have no reason to disbelieve) says that there are 200 teenage suicides per year in the UK. Are you claiming that over a five year period Kooth has really prevented at least half the suicidal teenagers in the UK from going on to kill themselves? What's your evidence for that? Or what exactly are you saying?

I think they threw the baby under the bus themselves.

So a publically funded socialised health service, which claims it is dangerously stretched, and which currently has a year long waiting list for life-saving cardiac surgery, has nevertheless spent £3 million setting children down a pathway which will lead to iatrogenic chronic illnesses and potentially amputation of healthy body parts, leading to more pressure on said socialsed healthcare service.

Make it make sense.

So please- do not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Unfortunately the bathwater is so toxic that it's taking a lot of babies with it.

Kooth is not alone in this. Many organisations for women and young people and vulnerable people which do a lot of excellent work are now doing harm as well. And since they have committed themselves so deeply to the harm, there's no easy way to stop the harm without also damaging the good work they do.

Or rather, suggesting the NHS wouldn’t be in the financial mess it is if it didn’t waste the money it has. I suspect the cost of this whole debacle is enormous.

I want to say something really important about Kooth. It is not just serving the minority of young people who focus their distress around their gender - it actually reaches young people with a huge range of issues and presentations. It offers a space where young people can go to talk anonymously about things that worry them and actually the team behind the scenes ( not bots or AI impersonators but real people) do a lot of excellent work in helping young people de escalate their concerns and worries. It is an early help service. I use the word service because that it what it is. People complain about why the NHS fund it … the truth is innovation ( and Kooth was highly innovative - set up when barely a handful of local authorities even had websites!) often comes from entrepreneurs willing to take a risk and do something different. The service is scrutinised and held accountable and rightly so. It has also saved the lives of thousands of teenagers who might not be here if it wasn’t for Kooth. So please- do not throw the baby out with the bath water.
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