Criminalising Distress examines practices related to the Serenity Built-in Mentoring (SIM) scheme, which focused individuals at excessive threat of suicide and self hurt who steadily contact emergency providers, and have become a nationwide scandal in 2021 because of a marketing campaign by the StopSIM Coalition.
Critically, the report outlines ongoing police and NHS schemes which proceed to criminalise misery as we speak, together with schemes by which police stay embedded within the psychological well being system.
Constructing on the work of service customers / survivors, together with the StopSIM Coalition, we argue that:
- The systemic circumstances which enabled SIM – entrenched coercive psychological well being care practices, behaviourism, neoliberalism and the stigmatising ‘persona dysfunction’ assemble – stay intact
- Service customers’ testimonies present SIM-like practices prompted iatrogenic hurt, whereas well being employees who tried whistleblowing had been punished for talking out
- A tradition of unaccountability and blame-shifting has resulted in an absence of significant institutional change
- Although NHS England known as for SIM-like practices to be “eradicated”, our analysis discovered a number of ongoing schemes which proceed to criminalise misery together with PAVE, FERN, HaRT and Op Ipsum.
We name for:
- An finish to punitive, exclusionary and discriminatory practices, and NHS collaboration with police to criminalise individuals in misery
- NHS England to apologise to the StopSIM Coalition and launch an unbiased inquiry into ongoing SIM-like practices
- Authorities to deal with the social determinants of psychological well being upstream in addition to funding non-coercive, community-based disaster help.