“I don’t want to say the wrong thing”: Mental health professionals’ narratives of feeling inadequately skilled when working with gender diverse adults
Trans, gender diverse and gender questioning adults are highly likely to experiencemental health difficulties, for multiple reasons including transphobia or minority stress.However, gender diverse adults often describe having negative experiences accessingmental healthcare in the UK. Concurrently, health professionals have described feelinginadequately skilled, and lacking confidence in their ability to support gender diversepeople. There has been limited research exploring the experiences of mental healthprofessionals who provide care for gender diverse people in mainstream mental health services, and even less in the UK. In this study, the accounts of seven mental health professionals from a range of disciplines were analysed with a constructionist narrative analysis, to better understand the nature of stories and positioning of individuals, within the local, social and historical contexts of the narratives’ construction. This paper focuses on participants’ narratives of feeling inadequately skilled when working with gender diverse individuals, which were drawn on and resisted in their stories. Implications for clinical practice and training are suggested.
Item Type | Article |
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Additional information | © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords | lgbt, transgender, gender diverse, mental health, mental health professionals, trans, health(social science), social psychology, gender studies, applied psychology |
Date Deposited | 15 May 2025 15:00 |
Last Modified | 31 May 2025 00:35 |