Review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust

Jolyon should hang his head in shame. It's about time there was a robust push-back on his behaviour.

1. The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide. One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers - some of the responses on social media show this.

Claims
The claims have been led by the legal campaign group the Good Law Project, who are challenging the decision by the previous Health Secretary to end the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs by private clinics to children and young people with gender dysphoria.
The central claim, made on X (formerly known as Twitter), is that there has been a large rise in suicide by current and recent patients of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) service at the Tavistock since an earlier restriction of puberty-blocking drugs that followed a High Court decision in a case (Bell v Tavistock) in December 2020. The rise is described as a “surge” in suicides and “an explosion”, indicating a substantial and, by implication, unequivocal increase. There are multiple references to children dying in future because they are unable to access puberty-blocking drugs.
This claim is said to be based on unpublished data provided by 2 members of staff at the Tavistock, described as whistleblowers. On Twitter/X the evidence is presented in screenshots of extracts from the records of Tavistock Board meetings and other documents. These variously refer to suicides, deaths from unspecified causes and “safety incidents”. A specific claim is that there was one suicide by a patient on the GIDS waiting list in the 3 years before the High Court judgment, and 16 deaths (rather than suicides) in the 3 years after the judgment. The whistleblowers are said to have alleged a cover-up by NHSE.
These claims have been retweeted thousands of times by other campaigners and members of the public. They have been repeated by some leading journalists, though there is nothing to suggest that they have examined the evidence for themselves. They too have adopted the language of “dying children”.

Responsible reporting of suicide in the media is an important strand of suicide prevention, and a central feature of the national suicide prevention strategy in England. Guidance has been developed by Samaritans, originally for the news media but with wider applicability to any public discussion of suicide, and increasingly relevant to social media.
The risks include:

• alarming stories about suicide causing distress to people who are themselves at risk
• identification - when someone sees in themselves a connection with a person who has died by suicide; leading to:
• imitation and suicide clusters in people with similar characteristics

• ensure that any claims about suicide are evidence-based and from a reliable source
• avoid alarming and dramatic language
• avoid the impression that suicide is the expected or likely outcome in certain situations
• avoid oversimplifying suicide by attributing it to a single cause which could be the basis of identification