A freedom of information request by Good Law Project has found that deaths by suicide of trans young people under 18 surged following the withdrawal of gender-affirming healthcare

    • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 days ago

      I think they have to know their policies caused this because they’re working so hard to cover it up:

      And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.

      To silence those raising the alarm on rising trans suicides as “dangerous” while ramping up the policies correlating with that rise is an act of grave moral wickedness. Good Law Project has worked tirelessly since the Appleby review to get the Department of Health to come clean. For its part, Streeting’s department has fought tooth and nail to block, often on spurious grounds, every freedom of information request. This is a continuation of a worrying trend we spotted under the Tories: the Tavistock’s own board minutes from 2021 state that their communications team has not approved FOIs asking for waiting list data due to “poor performance” and “potential reputational impact”.

      Forty-four of these deaths were within the time frame analysed for the government report by Professor Louis Appleby on suicides and gender dysphoria. That’s almost four times more than the number accounted for by the Appleby report, which stated that only 12 young people (over and under 18) who were current or former patients of the Tavistock took their own lives from 2018-2024.

      Still, we are appalled that Streeting commissioned and published a report to reassure the public that there was no significant rise in suicide rates, when 22 children took their own lives in a single year: 2021-22.

      Good Law Project was told by whistleblowers that, following the Bell vs Tavistock judgement, there was a significant increase in patient suicides. Our claims were dismissed and described as “insensitive, distressing and dangerous” in the government report.