Adolescent gender diversity: sociodemographic correlates & mental health outcomes

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.20057
In this podcast, we are joined by Akhgar Ghassabian, Assistant Professor at the Departments of Pediatrics, Population Health, and Environmental Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, and Dr. Tonya White, Professor at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam.
The focus of this podcast is on the JCPP paper ‘Adolescent gender diversity: sociodemographic correlates and mental health outcomes in the general population’ (doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13588).
Akhgar and Tonya set the scene by detailing what their study looked at, providing us with a summary of the paper, plus insight into what methodology they used, before sharing some of the key findings from the research.
In their paper, Akhgar and Tonya point to an association between gender diversity and mental health symptoms in adolescents, and in this podcast, Tonya elaborates on the relationship between the two.
Akhgar and Tonya then comment on their finding that more females were likely to have a gender-variant experience than males, and that adolescents with gender-variant experience appear to have higher autistic trait scores in the study. Akhgar and Tonya also highlight what implications, if any, can be drawn from these findings.
With this study showing that, whilst less than 1% of parents reported that their children had gender-variant experience, 4% of children reported this, Akhgar and Tonya discuss why parents may often be unaware of gender diverse feelings in their adolescence and how parental awareness or attitudes make a difference in terms of mental health outcomes, before exploring what the implications are of their findings for CAMH professionals.