The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has claimed that the country has seen an enormous surge of gender dysphoria cases in girls aged 13 to 17 since 2008.
Newly diagnosed cases in the 13 to 17 age bracket have gone up 1,500 per cent, while the number of cases for other age groups has also seen a significant rise as well, with experts not knowing the root cause for the increase in overall numbers.
For young men aged 18 to 24, there has also been an increase of 400 per cent during the same period according to the statistics, SVT reports.
Peter Salmi, an investigator at the National Board of Health, admitted that authorities were aware of the rise in cases, but said: “Yes, that the increase is clear, there is no doubt, however, we do not know what the increase is due to.”
Statistics show that those diagnosed with gender dysphoria are at much larger risk of suicide than the general Swedish population. Of the 6,334 people diagnosed with gender dysphoria since 1998, 21 men and 18 women have committed suicide.
“People with gender dysphoria who committed suicide also had a very high incidence of concurrent severe psychiatric diagnoses, making it difficult to distinguish one from the other in terms of suicide risk,” Peter Salmi said.
The increasing trend of gender dysphoria among young people in Sweden has been noted before, by medical professional Camilla Ernstsson, who in 2018, claimed that the specialised treatment centre in Umeå had gone from one or two new cases per year to 16 or 17 more recently.
As the rates of body dysmorphia increase so have the number of transgender surgeries performed in Sweden, with many taking place at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm.
The hospital, which has the largest centre for treating dysphoria in Sweden, came under criticism in April of last year when they revealed that doctors had performed breast removal surgery on at least one 14-year-old girl.
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