This post, authored by Mary Gilleece ,is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
The fact that a psychologist and surgeon have been successfully sued in America for approving and carrying out a double mastectomy on a girl who – as a child – thought she was a boy, ought to elicit panic through the entire child psychology industry. The successful case was brought by Fox Varian, now 22 against her psychologist, Dr Kenneth Einhorn who approved a double mastectomy and her surgeon, Dr Simon Chin, who performed it when she was 16. The New York Post reports:
The jury was not asked to rule on the ethics of gender-related surgical procedures for minors, but instead whether the medical professionals took appropriate steps before suggesting the threshold-crossing measure.
The implications around this stretch far beyond ‘gender affirming medicine’ into the whole of the child psychology profession. The latest NHS figures for 2024-25 show that a troubling 460,000 under-18s are prescribed anti-depressants in England, an increase of 47% since 2015-6. Over 4.2 million under-25s are on anti-depressants. Let me repeat that: 4.2 million under-25s – around a quarter of the total – and nearly half a million children take anti-depressants. Added to this, 135,000 thousand children are prescribed ADHD medication and 13,000 anti-psychotics.
For the purposes of this article, the question of whether these medications actually work and improve the lives of those who take them is beside the point. What is relevant is whether children and teenagers are in a position to fully understand the implications of taking these drugs. In what capacity are children and teenagers able to give consent to brain-altering medication? Are they being misdirected by adults in their family or in the medical profession towards medical intervention they don’t need and that might well harm them in the long term?
The trans argument – that unless gender-affirming care is given the child might kill themselves – is not dissimilar to that used around mental health medication: unless the child is given anti-depressants or anti-psychotics, they might kill themselves or self-harm. It would be dangerous not to prescribe. A Zuleika Dobson style mass suicide of the 460,000 children currently on anti-depressants is being helpfully averted. More likely in my view is the creation of a vast group of damaged adults who will look back on their medicated childhoods and wonder what on earth the adult medical professionals were doing to them. While the harm may not be as physically obvious as a double mastectomy, the injuries, both physical and mental from years spent on mind-altering drugs, can be irreparable.
I am thinking here of a 16 year-old girl I was sent by the local council to ‘support’. She had refused to leave the house for a year since her dad left. She was clearly absolutely heartbroken. Her mum had moved her new partner in and she hated having another man in the house. She cried easily and her pain was dreadful to feel. In her instance she led the treatment (she was deemed to be ‘Gillick competent‘) thanks to help with learning lines from TikTok about how to get her ‘meds’.
Two years in she’s been on anti-depressants with no meaningful improvement in her state of mind or day-to-day living experience and has put on two stone in weight. Her feelings have been blunted and while she doesn’t cry all the time, she doesn’t feel much of anything either. She has no interest in meeting boys (or girls). Over the years her low dose of sertraline has been increased with no effort made towards any lifestyle adjustments to cope with feelings of family sadness. As a deeply upset child of 16, was she really in full awareness of the long-term effects of anti-depressant use? Did her fragile mental state allow her properly to consider the risks, such as addiction, muted sex drive, sexual dysfunction, sleep disturbances, weight gain, suicide ideation and decrease in bone density?
Just a reminder, there are 460,000 children on anti-depressants.
Similarly, of the 135,000 children on ADHD medication, do they all understand the side-effects of taking stimulants during childhood? Do their parents? I am not so sure.
I am thinking here of a little eight year-old boy who I watched being forced to take his methylphenidate before our sessions together. He would scream when his Mum poured out the liquid. Once taken, his face would contort like a horrible scene in a marvel movie when the character takes on their ‘superpower’. He then became almost catatonic for an hour. Sometimes he would be sick, and the whole rigmarole would have to start again. So depleted did his appetite become that he lost weight and was almost admitted to be fed through a tube. Two years later he is still on higher dose medication and is both underweight and short for his age. His erratic behaviour is unchanged (largely because he’s glued to his phone and gaming gear).
Obviously an eight year-old boy cannot in any way grasp concepts such as ‘long-term growth suppression’, ‘cardiovascular risk’, or ‘elevated risk of psychosis and tics’ so the responsibility for giving informed consent falls on the clinician or parent. One would hope that clinicians are thinking about the long-term outcomes for the boy – and indeed for all children who are prescribed powerful psychotropic medication. If, on the other hand, the prescribing doctors were like Dr Kenneth Einhorn and Dr Simon Chin and did not take “appropriate steps” before suggesting such medical interventions to a child, the court cases can’t come soon enough.
Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.
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