Who is Youth Mental Health Canada?
And are they helping?
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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher; commentator)
If you’re a teacher chances are your social media feeds often feature ads from Youth Mental Health Canada (YMHC). They publish books and pamphlets and sell them on their website. They also offer workshops and other “resources”. Schools often purchase these materials and the content has a major influence on how teachers interact with students.
While many of the posts I see from YMHC are not at all controversial I balked when this once recently appeared on my newsfeed:
I found this jarring for two reasons:
The claim that people think Pride events are turning “straight kids” into “queer kids” is a straw man. If we’re talking about gay and lesbian identified kids, few people worry about that anymore, if anyone ever really did. If you’re straight, you know no number of pride flags or events could ever drive you to have sex with a person of the same sex as you. It is now accepted that sexual orientation is not something you choose. The number of gay people in societies all over the world during all of recorded history has remained remarkably stable regardless of the social climate, which usually was, and often still is, very hostile towards such people. The prospect of kids identifying as gay or lesbian is not something that many people are concerned about these days in Canada.
The second claim is more disturbing. The implication is that if you refuse to accept and affirm a young person’s sexual preferences, they may kill themselves. But, as mentioned, gay and lesbian people are pretty universally accepted in Canada, and while it may be a shock initially for a parent to hear their child identify as such, the vast majority come to accept it fairly quickly and are very supportive. Love for our children is unconditional. So why would they make such a claim? Well, that comes down to their use of the word “queer”.
Queer refers to the ever-increasing string of identities that have to do with sexuality, at minimum Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, (LGBT) often with Queer added or with prefixes like 2S (“two spirited”), resulting in a string like 2SLGBTQ+. Of all of these, the most controversial is certainly Transgender. While it may take some time to accept that your child is gay or lesbian, a child’s proclamation that they are transgender is far, far more troubling, and not because most parents are “transphobic”.
No, it is because the road to transgenderism is fraught with all kinds of perils. While it is not too hard to imagine living a happy life as a reasonably well adjusted gay or lesbian person (at least in a Western democracy), living as a trans person will involve using powerful drugs to block puberty, lifelong drug dependency on cross sex hormones with unknown health impacts (not to mention the cost), as well as risky and painful surgeries that can also have life-long health and well-being impacts. The choice to follow this road will lead to irreversible physical changes that a person may come to regret. Sterility and compromised sexual function are also very real possibilities, along with a long list of other possible issues.
But trans activists view transgenderism as gay/lesbian 2.0. They believe that a person’s gender- their male or femaleness, is not related to the person’s biological sex. Thus, from their point of view, if a kid, no matter how young, identifies as trans, it is to be taken as a fact that the kid is “in the wrong body” and the only solution is to modify that body to match the kid’s identity. To the activists, affirmation and transition, starting with social transition and moving on to puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, is the only acceptable way forward. As true believers that gender dysphoria can only mean one thing, that the kid is in the wrong body, the activists will do, or say anything to get dysphoric kids on the path to transition. They will start by accusing recalcitrant parents as “transphobic” but if that fails, they fall back to their trump card: that refusal to embark on transition may result in suicide. But is this actually true?
No. There is no conclusive evidence (also see here) that it is, thus YMCH reveals itself to be an activist organization rather than one primarily concerned with the health and wellbeing of kids. In their zeal to promote “affirmative care” as the one and only remedy for gender dysphoria they are either willfully ignorant of this fact, or they are knowingly spreading false information. Either way, they are causing real harm to children, because they have a large following of educators who see them as an authority on transgenderism. These well-meaning educators are thus eager to enthusiastically affirm a new gender identity proclaimed by any kid, just as they would accept a kid who announces they are gay. I have even seen teachers wearing T-shirts that say “believe trans kids”. This gets nods of approval from administrators. In fact, there is evidence that many kids being encouraged to “transition” are in fact simply gay or lesbian and find the idea that they are “normal” but trapped in the wrong body to be more socially acceptable. Gay people I know have told me they could likely have been pushed into transitioning when they were young.
The misinformation around child gender confusion is coming at teachers from all angles and most of them, particularly councilors and special education teachers, have bought into the activists’ belief system, gender ideology, which holds that being male or female is unrelated to the physical body and thus the “affirmative care” model is being promoted in the schools. The negative impacts of the drugs and surgeries are not presented fully and honestly (if at all) and de-transitioning is not mentioned, or at least presented as a very rare phenomena when in fact the rate is unknown due to a lack of diligent follow up, among other reasons.
Could YCMH be ignorant of the evidence that is out there? That is hard to believe. The most comprehensive study done to date is the Cass Review undertaken by Hillary Cass for the National Health Service (NHS) England. Among its many findings were the following:
There is no simple explanation for the increase in the numbers of predominantly young people and young adults who have a trans or gender-diverse identity, but there is broad agreement that it is a result of a complex interplay between biological, psychological and social factors. This balance of factors will be different in each individual.
While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.
The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.
The use of masculinising/feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.
Clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity.
For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress. For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.
Innovation is important if medicine is to move forward, but there must be a proportionate level of monitoring, oversight and regulation that does not stifle progress, while preventing creep of unproven approaches into clinical practice. Innovation must draw from and contribute to the evidence base.
What Cass did not find is that kids who do not receive drug and surgery are any more likely to commit suicide. Whatever good YMCH might be doing, using a false claim to drive a parent to make such a major decision about their child’s health is unforgivable.
So, who are these YMCH people? Psychologists? Psychiatrists? Medical Doctors? On what basis are they making a dangerous false claim like this? What is their evidence?
On their website, they state that “YMHC approaches mental health and wellness issues from an intersectional, social justice, and equity perspective. Our commitment to human rights issues for all people is evident in our work in the last ten years”. This statement confirms that they are an ideologically driven organization, not a scientific one.
The Executive Director and Founder of Youth Mental Health Canada (YMHC) is Sheryl Boswell. Interestingly, she is not named on the website, but her picture is provided and according to the website, she
is a passionate Educator and Child and Youth Expert known for inspiring change with her engaging, inspiring style, and practical ideas. Her resources, presentations, workshops, and courses consolidate her background in education, mental wellness, human rights, equity, and disability awareness and support, and draw on a wide evidence base. Her career started as a Special Education teacher in Zimbabwe, Africa. She has worked with young people with disabilities and studied education and disability issues in university. She brings broad teaching knowledge from working with elementary, secondary and postsecondary, and adult education students. She is the author of five mental wellness journal workbooks and a guidebook on supporting students. She is a member of the International Association of Youth Mental Health, International Network for School Attendance, International Association for Suicide Prevention, and other organizations focused on youth mental health, suicide prevention, and school attendance. She has had the privilege of working with and learning from hundreds of schools, community organizations, and professionals internationally.
In fact, no one at all is named on the website. You would think an organization claiming that they are “offering essential, accessible, and meaningful resources to support the most important role of all –encouraging the healthy growth of young people”, and that they “provide the tools needed to meet the challenges of education, health, and life” would have a long list of credentialed professionals from a variety of domains including social work, psychiatry, psychology, and pediatric medicine at a bare minimum, but the only person they describe (without identifying her) is Boswell and they don’t even say that she has a university degree. I doubt you need one to teach in Zimbabwe, which is the only thing listed on her bio resembling an actual job.
Maybe I’m being too hard on YMHC. It’s possible they are doing some good work. But promoting “affirmative care” by telling people that if they don’t get on board with it, kids are going to kill themselves, when the best evidence we currently have says no such thing, is definitely not how you support child mental health. It renders the organization devoid of any credibility.
I would advise teachers to approach all YMHC publications, workshops, etc. with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Disgraced Former Associate Director Files $7.5 Million Suit Against the Peel District School Board
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Good. So many of these 'benevolent' bodies are suspect. its really easy to set up something that sounds somehow 'official', get government grants and run what amounts to a one-man operation as a personal project.
"It is now accepted that sexual orientation is not something you choose."
Nice use of the passive voice to make a dubious and contentious claim seem uncontroversial. For the sake of accuracy, you might do well to add a qualifier, e.g., "widely accepted," or "unthinkingly accepted," or "accepted as the current PC right-think."
OTOH, it is also now widely accepted that sexual orientation is not only something you choose, but something you can make up, ad infinitum.