Gosh Bee. This is really interesting!
Here is another complaint:
“May–June 2024 – undermining suicide data
In parallel, Sex Matters began pestering DHSC to discredit suicide statistics among trans youth. They challenged data quoted by Mermaids’ former CEO, complained that Tavistock had refused their FOI requests, and asked DHSC to verify the numbers.
They followed up with their own “factsheet” — Dispelling the Suicide Myth — a document designed to strip urgency from the risks faced by trans children. When no reply came, they chased again in June: “When can we expect a response?”
This was lobbying to erase the most devastating consequence of denying care.
Think about that: while trans teenagers are dying, anti-rights hate groups are pestering civil servants to strip out the evidence.”
Imagine that! And did Trans Advocacy show their working here to prove the fact sheet was misinformation? Not that I can see!
But here .. the numbers were checked and verified.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-suicides-and-gender-dysphoria-at-the-tavistock-and-portman-nhs-foundation-trust/review-of-suicides-and-gender-dysphoria-at-the-tavistock-and-portman-nhs-foundation-trust-independent-report
How inconvenient to the author, and how surprising they failed to link this up.
Here it is here for those reading along :
Conclusions
1. The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide by young patients attending the gender services at the Tavistock since the High Court ruling in 2020 or after any other recent date. The figures for the 6 years covered in this review are 12 suicides in total, 2 per year on average, of whom half were under 18. With small numbers, single-figure differences can be expected and causal explanations are unreliable.
The patients who died were in different points in the care system, including post-discharge, suggesting no consistent link to any one aspect of care. They had multiple social and clinical risk factors for suicide.
However, it is likely that there has been a rise over a longer period as young people at risk have increasingly presented with gender dysphoria and referrals to GIDS have risen.
There is a degree of uncertainty about the deaths recorded as “suicide not confirmed”. It is possible that more information on these cases would result in amended figures for individual years but the numbers remain too small to affect my conclusions.
2. 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.
Another is identification, already-distressed adolescents hearing the message that “people like you, facing similar problems, are killing themselves”, leading to imitative suicide or self-harm, to which young people are particularly susceptible.
Then there is the insensitivity of the “dead child” rhetoric. Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument. To the families of 200 teenagers a year in England, it is devastating and all too real.
3. The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence. To be reliable, evidence should be objective, unbiased and open to independent scrutiny. It should admit uncertainty.
Campaign groups are often selective about evidence - there is nothing wrong with this until it becomes misleading and potentially harmful. The evidence put into the public domain for an “explosion” of suicides is not unbiased nor has it been independently verified. There seems to be no suicide expertise behind the claims.
4. Suicide by any young person is a profound tragedy: it should be seen as an indictment of our society. Young people with gender dysphoria may well have experienced ostracism and abuse, and their distress is likely to be heightened if services are perceived as rejecting. It is unfortunate that puberty-blocking drugs have come to be seen as the touchstone issue, the difference between acceptance and non-acceptance. We need to move away from this perception among patients, staff and the public.
This is a group of young people who need compassion and security, skilled clinical assessment, early treatment for mental illnesses such as depression, support within their families and schools and online, and an expectation of recovery and a fulfilling future. It is vital that these are the assurances the NHS and its partner agencies are able to convey.
5. In the end this is about a group of young people at risk of suicide and our collective responsibility to their safety. This means specialist health services with the capacity to respond to rising demand and appropriate skills in general services. It means a measured public discourse, making sure we do not stoke up prejudice or cause unnecessary alarm to the young people and their families.
We need to ensure also that we have high quality data in which everyone has confidence. The number of deaths should be monitored, not only in gender services but other mainstream databases, as is now happening in NCMD and in my own unit, the National Confidential Inquiry. Future prevention will depend on it.