“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 experience
mental health difficulties, for multiple reasons including transphobia or minority stress.
However, gender diverse adults often describe having negative experiences accessing
mental healthcare in the UK. Concurrently, health professionals have described feeling
inadequately skilled, and lacking confidence in their ability to support gender diverse
people. There has been limited research exploring the experiences of mental health
professionals 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.