Dr. Cheryl Green: What’s Ailing Young Women

“The most common precursor of gender dysphoria, though, seems to be intense social media use. The gender dysphoria more often seems to stem from that rather than from the home.”

Cheryl L. Green M.D., the author of the 2023 book Heal Your Daughter: How Lifestyle Psychiatry Can Save Her from Depression, Cutting, and Suicidal Thoughts and the accompanying Heal Your Daughter Workbook: Six Weeks to Feeling Good with Lifestyle Psychiatry, responded to a series of questions from Merion West’s Emeline Torrens about what she is seeing in her patients, most of whom are adolescent girls in the Los Angeles area. Dr. Green earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard College and a Ph.D. at Princeton University prior to graduating from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2011. Dr. Green is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Southern California in addition to seeing patients in private practice. Her works tends to emphasize positive lifestyle changes. Merion West released an excerpt from her book in April of this year. In her responses below, Dr. Green touches on gender dysphoria, anxiety and depression in young people, and how the problem has become more acute in recent years.

As we have seen, “diagnoses of youths with gender dysphoria” have been surging over the past few years in the United States, from 15,172 in 2017 to 42,167 in 2021, according to data from Komodo Health Inc. This has also attracted significant media attention, much of it polarized. Based on what you’re seeing day to day in your practice, do these statistics reflect reality?

Yes. I have noticed trends in my practice toward greater anxiety, greater depression, more cutting, and definitely more gender dysphoria. Teens used to worry about their sexual preference; now, many teens are wondering about their gender identity, instead. The whole sexual preference issue seems to have receded into the background. Many of my teen patients say that they are asexual or pansexual without seeming to think too much about it. Yet, they seem to be worrying a lot about what gender identity they might want to adopt. Many worry about this for a number of years and flip back and forth several times before making a “final” decision. But “final” is a relative term, it seems.