Two years after forming, it is with sadness we announce the StopSIM Coalition is disbanding. As a group of mad and disabled activists, this campaign has taken a huge emotional toll on us and significantly damaged our health. Regrettably, it has simply become untenable for us as individuals to continue our activism in this capacity.
Since forming, dozens of service users, survivors and allies representing activist networks from across the United Kingdom have been a part of, or proactively supported, the StopSIM Coalition. This grassroots resistance has led to historic and in some cases unprecedented achievements within the service user/survivor movements, including widespread support from professional bodies and national mental health charities; a public petition with more than 64,000 signatures; the effective closure of SIM’s parent company (the High Intensity Network); the end of a number of SIM or SIM-like teams across the country; and more broadly advancing the national conversation around the criminalisation of mental distress. We are deeply thankful to everyone whose continued support has enabled the campaign to generate change within mental health practice.
Despite these significant accomplishments, the criminalisation of distress remains endemic across mental health services. While we welcome important steps in challenging the violent, discriminatory and harmful practices SIM promoted, such as the new NICE guidelines on self harm, this falls short of the fundamental ‘culture shift’ urgently needed. Numerous Trusts across England continue to exploit the lack of an authoritative national policy position by continuing elements of SIM and SIM-like practices, while providing assurances they have never used such approaches. Much more work is needed to ensure that protections for patients are embedded both at national and local levels, within policy and practice.
Our agreement to work with NHS England on co-producing a policy was based on 3 main principles: confidentiality, equal partnership (full access and transparency) and that neither party would publish without the consent of the other. NHS England broke all 3 of these principles. Confidentiality was broken when an NHS employee leaked the executive summary to the Health Service Journal in February 2023. NHS England repeatedly broke their agreement to treat us as equal partners when they excluded us from conversations with executives who did not feel inclined to approve the policy, and in refusing to share details of the legal challenges made by Wessex AHSN. Finally, NHS England went back on their word not to publish an altered version of the policy without our consent when Tim Kendall published a letter to senior leadership in NHS England mental health trusts on 10th March 2023, without the agreement or awareness of the Coalition, plagiarising our work on the policy. NHS England has dissolved the agreement they entered into with us through these series of choices.
In light of this, the Coalition is taking the decision to publish the most up to date version of the full joint policy. We believe it is a matter of national importance that findings from the local reviews, which were brought about through service user activism and wider public campaigning, and NHS England’s response are not covered up. Although it has not been formally endorsed by NHS England, we urge individual Trusts to recognise the strength of support for this policy, among service users, stakeholders and professionals, and adopt this policy locally. The detail in this policy provides a level of clarity that is currently absent from the brief statement issued by Tim Kendall, as well as including recommendations about the care Trusts should now provide patients who have been under SIM or a similar model, and findings of the local reviews conducted in mid 2021.
Our co-production on this policy was approved in 2021, before our work with NHS England began, by Sir Simon Stevens (then CEO) and NHS England’s legal team. NHS England used this co-production in their media lines as a shield to criticism and questions about SIM in the press. The subsequent work on this policy was informed by extensive stakeholder engagement, including service users and lived experience groups, service providers, professional bodies and mental health charities. In January 2023, this draft policy had been approved for publication by stakeholders and all NHS England senior executives, with the exception of the Communications Office, as well as NHS England’s legal team (prior to Wessex AHSN’s challenges). This includes Amanda Pritchard (CEO), David Sloman (COO), Claire Murdoch (Senior Responsible Officer for mental health) and Tim Kendall (national clinical director for mental health).
Once again, we would like to highlight that Wessex Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), led by Bill Gillespie, used public funding to pay for lawyers to prevent the implementation and publication of this policy. NHS England’s legal team applied no scrutiny to the basis of these legal challenges, even when their validity was questioned by NHS England’s own employees. NHS England executives bowed to minimal pressure from Wessex AHSN and in doing so failed in their duty to put patients at the heart of the NHS and to be accountable to the public, communities and patients they serve. Gross failings of this nature have extremely serious implications for the wider governance of the NHS, and rightly undermines public trust in the institution.
The “politically inconvenient” StopSIM x NHS England joint policy:
Read here
The legacy and momentum of mad/survivor/service user activism paved the way for the StopSIM campaign. That momentum will not stop here. Despite disbanding the coalition, this is not the end of the campaign against SIM or the criminalisation of distress. Indeed, even if this policy had been endorsed we recognise that it would not have achieved everything that we wanted. No one policy, nor one campaign, will be enough to weed out these harmful and abusive practices, which have been embedded within NHS mental health services for decades. We encourage all those who have capacity to continue resisting SIM and the criminalisation of distress by taking action locally and nationally, in whatever way you can.
The StopSIM emails and social media will no longer be monitored. However our website and social media accounts will remain active as an archive of the campaign and survivor activism. Our existing funds will be used to future proof the http://www.stopsim.co.uk website for at least 10 years, with the remainder to be donated to Recovery In The Bin’s legal fund for people who have been criminalised as a result of mental distress.
In Solidarity,
The StopSIM Coalition
STOPSIM 