How do mental health professionals describe their experiences of providing care for gender diverse adults? A systematic literature review

Gender diverse people experience significantly high levels of mental health difficulties, face significant barriers accessing mental healthcare, and often report negative experiences with mental health professionals. At the same time, healthcare professionals describe feeling deskilled when providing care for gender diverse adults. This paper aims to systematically review research into mental health professionals’ experiences of providing care for gender diverse individuals, and the kind of research methods employed in these investigations. PubMed, SCOPUS, psycARTICLES, and psychINFO were searched, as well citation and reference lists of relevant articles. From 268 search results, 12 articles were deemed relevant to be included in the review. The studies used quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods approaches. Each article was evaluated against established quality guidelines. All studies were likely to have been affected by social desirability bias, and had limited exploration of participants’ contexts, or social discourse. The quality of the articles varied. Clinicians reported having minimal training about gender diversity, and they tended to be less competent working with gender diverse clients compared to LGB clients. Participants described uncertainty working with gender diverse clients, and all the studies identified the need for improved training for mental health professionals working with gender diverse adults.