Coalition Calls for Halt to Use of ‘Unethical and Unsafe’ Mental Distress Emergency Scheme

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From Disability News Service: “Disabled activists are calling for an immediate halt to the use of a multi-agency scheme that they believe is unethical, unlawful and unsafe, and which they say puts people in severe mental distress at risk of being denied vital support.

Under the leadership of a police officer and a mental health professional, Serenity Integrated Mentoring (SIM) puts pressure on users of mental health services – often those at high risk of suicide and self-harm – who have not committed a crime but are seen as ‘high-intensity users’ of emergency services.

There are concerns that this can involve withholding assessment and treatment, and gives police officers a key role in making clinical decisions when service-users are in crisis.

The new StopSIM Coalition has warned that the system is being rolled out across NHS England, despite the lack of high-quality research into its impact on service-users.

The coalition of service-users and allies says it has ‘grave concerns’ about SIM and wants to see the use of the scheme halted while an independent review is carried out into its ‘evidence base, safety, legality, ethics, governance and acceptability to service users.'”

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1 COMMENT

  1. So this is a British idea in which one of their cops is a leader in the alleged treatment team. Too bad that most of the pohmies (Prisoners of Her Majesty’s Empire) I’ve talked to seem to believe that their officers are generally nitwits (one of the major reasons they don’t wear sidearms) who they wouldn’t trust to give them the correct time of day, much less listen and respond properly to their accounts of personal misery.