I deal with suicidal children and teenagers on a regular basis. They are assessed, their intent evaluated, and a safety plan is put in place. Usually this safety plan involves constant supervision at home with safeguards in place. If the risk is deemed very high and/or full supervision of a child who has real intent cannot be provided, the child is admitted to a mental health unit. This is very rare, compared to the number of presentations. The vast majority of the time a child can be kept safe and prevented from serious self-harm at home, with good outpatient mental health support. Obviously mental health support for children and adolescents isn’t as good as it could be, and is geographically variable but management does not include acquiescing to the demands of the child.
I have yet to have it explained to me how children who are apparently suicidal from their lack of gender affirmation are inherently harder to keep safe than others who present for other reasons. Are they more committed to their suicidal ideation? If that is the case, why aren’t inpatient child mental health units full of children who are suicidal because of lack of gender affirmation? And if they are more committed to their suicidal ideation, does that mean the solution is to acquiesce and give them treatments that don’t offer any psychological benefit but incontrovertibly lead to physical harm, or escalate their mental health support?
The Tavistock admitted that suicide in their experience has been rare, one case, and their own evidence shows the children don’t benefit psychologically. So the reasons they still want to give children puberty blockers are....what? What else is there?
The answer is, it’s a lie. Children who want medical gender affirmation are no more likely to be presenting to the emergency departments, waiting for acute mental health assessments, taking up beds in inpatient mental health units than any other children. Puberty blockers are actually given to meet an ideal that has been created, that it will be wonderful for a child to be able to be more like the sex they want to be when they’re older. I know this because I know children who have expressed exactly zero suicidal ideation who have been put on puberty blockers. The suicide stats are just a front, because none of the gender clinics want to admit they’re using puberty blockers out of a pursuit for an ideal that adults have told them they want current children to have that they didn’t have: to “pass” better. When Norman Spack said he was “salivating” at the idea of giving children puberty blockers, he wasn’t talking about “salivating” about the idea of reducing suicidal ideation.
Parents are incredibly vulnerable and they’ve been led to believe, by clinics and certain organisations, that this is the only pathway to true happiness, so when asked to consider risks and negatives of these drugs, it’s very difficult. There are a number of professionals around the world who deserve a great deal of scrutiny for this.