Psychiatr. praxi. 2022;23(1):e33-e41 | DOI: 10.36290/psy.2022.015

Gender dysphoria as a phenomenon of our time?

MUDr. Vladislav Chvála¹, PhDr. Ludmila Trapková²

¹ Středisko komplexní terapie psychosomatických poruch v Liberci

² Ordinace klinické psychologie v Praze

At our daily outpatient clinics in Prague and Liberec, we are increasingly recruiting families with adolescents who suffer from gender dysphoria for family therapy. The situation began to remind us of the 1990s, when we saw an increase in families with eating disorders. As then, our attention is drawn to the speed with which the phenomenon, known only in specialized workplaces, is spreading throughout the Western world. The similarity is important for a family therapist. Both phenomena begin to manifest in the same developmental phase of the family, at the beginning of puberty and during it. In family therapy terminology, these are symptoms of the difficulties of the separation process from the family, in our view of social childbirth. From 1994 to 2021, we cared for at least 34 such families. We have admitted fifteen to treatment in the last three years, ten of them in 2021. Given the small capacity of our workplace, which is available to psychosomatic cases, such an increase in a single diagnosis is something extraordinary. Therefore, we had to think about a new striking bio-psycho-social phenomenon, try to reflect it in a broader context than just the level of biological knowledge.

Keywords: gender incongruence dysphoria, eating disorder, family therapy, bio­‑psycho­‑social concept.

Published: April 8, 2022  Show citation