New Training Program Aims to Help Psychiatrists Talk About Sexual Health With Teens

Sexual health is one of the most quietly neglected corners of adolescent psychiatry. Young people aged 12 to 24 who live with psychiatric disorders face a heightened risk of sexual difficulties compared with their peers, ranging from sexual dysfunction linked to their illness and its treatment to diminished sexual and relational satisfaction. Yet in clinical practice across youth psychiatric wards, the topic is rarely raised, and clinicians often lack the training, confidence, or institutional permission to open the conversation. A new study published in BMC Medical Education describes the systematic development of a training intervention designed to change that, giving psychiatry professionals the tools to address sexual health with their adolescent patients in an informed, structured, and compassionate way.

The research team, led by Michelle Veilleux of the Fondation Santé des Étudiants de France and Université Paris Cité, together with colleagues from INSERM research units and Paris hospitals, set out to build the program on firm methodological ground rather than on intuition. They followed the Medical Research Council framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions, a widely respected roadmap in health services research that insists on understanding the problem, identifying the underlying mechanisms of change, and tailoring the intervention to its implementation context before any evaluation takes place. This stepwise approach matters because training programs that skip the development phase frequently fail to change real-world behavior, no matter how well intentioned they are.

The first stage involved a rigorous assessment of learning needs. The team combined an analysis of the existing scientific literature with an examination of the patient context and semistructured interviews with professionals working in adolescent psychiatry. These interviews revealed a landscape of uncertainty: clinicians recognized that sexual health was relevant to their patients’ wellbeing but reported feeling ill equipped to discuss it, unsure of their role legitimacy, and concerned about the boundaries of professional practice. The needs assessment made clear that the barrier was not indifference but a genuine gap in knowledge, skills, and confidence, compounded by the sensitive and sometimes taboo nature of the subject.

From this groundwork, the researchers identified sixteen pedagogical objectives, which they organized into three coherent domains. The first domain covers sexual knowledge, including the physiological and pharmacological facts that clinicians need in order to understand how psychiatric disorders and psychotropic medications can affect desire, arousal, and sexual function in young patients. The second domain addresses professional attitudes and role legitimacy, tackling the internal and cultural barriers that make clinicians hesitant to see sexual health as part of their job. The third domain focuses on applied communication and intervention skills, translating knowledge and attitude into the practical ability to raise the topic, respond to disclosure, and intervene appropriately.

What distinguishes this intervention from many ad hoc training efforts is its explicit grounding in behavioral theory. The team constructed a theory of change model by combining social cognitive theory, the theory of reasoned action, and the World Health Organization’s guidelines for brief sexuality-related communication. Social cognitive theory emphasizes that behavior change depends on self-efficacy, the belief that one can successfully perform the behaviors in question, which can be built through modeling, guided practice, and mastery experiences. The theory of reasoned action adds that intentions to act are shaped by attitudes toward the behavior and by perceived social norms, meaning the training must also shift what clinicians believe is expected of them in their professional environment.

The WHO framework for brief sexuality-related communication supplies the clinical technique. It provides a structured, nonjudgmental way for health professionals to introduce sexual health into routine consultations, using open questions and permission-giving language that normalizes the topic without forcing disclosure. By weaving these three theoretical strands together, the intervention targets multiple determinants of behavior simultaneously: the capability to act, the confidence to act, and the motivation to act. This theory-driven architecture is the pedagogical core of the program and is intended to make the resulting behavior change durable rather than superficial.

The intervention itself takes the form of three training modules. The first is a short introductory session designed to open the subject, establish shared vocabulary, and signal institutional endorsement of the effort. The remaining two modules are skill-focused, using the theoretical models to build concrete competencies in recognizing the sexual health impacts of psychiatric disorders and psychotropic treatments, and in communicating about these issues with adolescents in a clinical setting. The modular structure allows the training to be adapted to different ward schedules and professional groups, from nurses and psychologists to psychiatrists, reflecting the multidisciplinary reality of adolescent psychiatric care.

Crucially, the developers did not design the program in a vacuum. They explored the specificities and needs of the implementation context, the actual adolescent psychiatry wards where the training would be deployed, and incorporated these findings into the design. This attention to context is a hallmark of the MRC framework and reflects a growing consensus in implementation science that an intervention’s success depends as much on fit with local workflows, hierarchies, and cultures as on the quality of its content. A training program that ignores the realities of a busy inpatient unit, for example, risks being perceived as an added burden rather than a valued resource.

The study was conducted as part of the SEX-T-ADO research project, registered as NCT05316948, and received a favorable opinion from a French Committee for the Protection of Persons, with data collection compliant with national regulations and the Declaration of Helsinki. The work was funded by a grant from the French program for research in nursing and paramedical sciences, known as PHRIP, and by the French National Association for Research and Technology, ANRT, underscoring the institutional commitment in France to strengthening the paramedical and nursing dimensions of this kind of care.

The authors are careful to frame this publication as a development study rather than a proof of effectiveness. A future evaluation is planned to assess whether the training actually changes professional behavior, knowledge, and attitudes, and to examine how the program is implemented across different clinical contexts. That evaluation will be the true test of the theory of change model. Still, the significance of the work lies in its demonstration that a sensitive, long-overlooked aspect of adolescent mental health care can be approached with the same scientific rigor as any other clinical intervention. For the many young psychiatric patients whose sexual wellbeing has been silently affected by their disorders and medications, and for the clinicians who have wanted to help but did not know how, this research offers a credible, evidence-based path forward.

Subject of Research: Development of a theory-based training intervention for psychiatry professionals on adolescent sexual health

Article Title: Development of a training intervention to support psychiatry professionnals in adressing sexual health with adolescents

Article References: Veilleux, M., Martin, P., Ghosn, J., Foussier, A., Thoison, C., Huas, C., Godart, N., & Bourmaud, A. (2026). Development of a training intervention to support psychiatry professionnals in adressing sexual health with adolescents. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10351-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10351-2

Keywords: adolescent psychiatry, sexual health, medical education, training intervention, psychotropic medications, behavior change theory, Medical Research Council framework, clinical communication, mental health, intervention development, youth mental health, health professionals