Psychotherapy is not ‘conversion therapy’ says chief psychiatrist

The head of psychiatry at Burgos university hospital in northern Spain, Dr Juan García Mellado, has suggested that increased use of social media during lockdown is to blame for the uptick in the numbers of young people seeking help in his hospital’s new gender clinic. 

The young people who pass through the unit are unwell and need psychiatric help, Dr García Mellado told the local newspaper Diario de Burgos. But, he added, 80% of the initial consultations “come to nothing” as they are not trans. 

He attributed the boom in cases to the “fashionability” of transgenderism among young people, driven by increased internet use. He worries that the children will be put on “a path of no return” if they are started on puberty blockers. The priorities when dealing with children and adolescents, he says, “are prudence, observation and accompaniment.” 

The gender identity unit of Burgos hospital, which serves adults and children from the surrounding regions, opened in March this year. Its team features endocrinologists, gynaecologists, plastic surgeons and ENTs. The team also offers psychosocial help to accompany people during transition. 

Dr García Mellado told the reporter that his views are “in line with the president of the Spanish Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health.” Genspect reached out to the president of the Society (AEPNYA), Maria Luis Lazaro Garcia, to confirm this claim. 

She responded: “Given the convulsive times around the gender distressed young people these days, we (from AEPNYA) are adopting a reflexive and thoughtful approach. In that line we have produced our position statement, and we are organising a course in order to inform professionals of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and have a calm space for discussion. We have invited psychiatrists, psychologists, endocrinologists, philosophers, sociologists and law professionals in order to have a deep and thoughtful discussion.”

The AEPNYA statement on the trans law points to several issues in the proposed legislation, namely its failure to protect the fundamental rights of young people to comprehensive medical care.

Dr García Mellado’s comments come amid political upheaval in Spain over the Ley Trans (trans law), a proposed self-ID bill that would allow children as young as 12 to change their sex on official documents. He is critical of the proposal. One of the problems with the bill is that it ignores the fact that some countries are scaling back their previous recommendations on paediatric transition, he said, also lamenting the fact that mental health experts had not consulted in its drafting.

Dr García Mellado adds that psychotherapy is not “conversion therapy”, as the Ministry of Equality has called it, the government department behind the Ley Trans. He worries that if approved as it is, “mental health professionals will stop evaluating, and these people will go straight to hormones and, some, to surgery.”