This campaign began with a death that a hostile press and a failing institution both contributed to. Mental health is not a side chapter here. It is the origin of the argument.
The Celebrity Protection Law is often described as a press regulation measure. It is more accurately a mental health measure. It exists because a person under sustained public attack, facing a prosecution and abandoned by the institutions around her, died — and because everything that led there was lawful.
"Be kind" became a hashtag instead of a duty of care. This page sets out the health-service half of that argument, alongside the legal half already made under the Caroline Flack Law.
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 wrote parity between mental and physical health into statute. More than a decade later, a person with chest pain and a person in psychiatric crisis still receive visibly different responses, at different speeds, from services funded at different levels.
Parity is not a slogan awaiting legislation. It is legislation awaiting enforcement.
Children and adolescent mental health waits are the clearest failure in the system, and the most consequential: a young person waiting eighteen months from age fourteen loses a stretch of development that does not come back.
Publish waits from first request for help — not from acceptance onto a caseload — and publish rejected referrals separately. A service that manages its waiting list by refusing referrals has a good waiting list and a bad service.
Transition from child to adult mental health services is where a large number of young people simply fall out of care, re-presenting later in crisis. The threshold for adult services is often higher than the one they qualified under the day before their birthday.
The commitment: continuity of treatment through transition, with a duty to hand over rather than discharge, and no reassessment against a higher bar purely because of age.
A person in psychiatric crisis needs a clinician and a bed. What they frequently get is a police officer, a corridor and a long night — because that is the service that answers.
Crisis care should mean a 24-hour route staffed by mental health professionals, a place of safety that is not a custody suite, and an absolute presumption against detaining a child in police custody as a place of safety. Where it happens, it should be reported and explained.
Looked-after children carry more trauma than almost any group in the country and face some of the worst access to treatment — partly because placement moves reset the referral each time, and partly because distress in a child in care is read as behaviour rather than as a health need.
The commitment: a mental health assessment that follows the child, not the placement, a duty on the corporate parent to secure treatment as a parent would, and care status recorded so the pattern can be audited under the tenth protected characteristic.
This is core mandate. A person's mental health history is used against them in three places: by the press as colour, by the justice system as credibility, and by institutions as a reason not to take a complaint seriously. Article 14 prohibits all three, and the All Citizens Protection Law makes that prohibition actionable in one forum.
Medical records reaching a publisher is an Article 8 breach with a named person responsible — and under the Caroline Flack Law both the leaker and the publisher answer for it.
Protection from media-driven mental health harm, privacy of medical data, and non-discrimination on mental health grounds are core mandate: fixed positions, defended without a poll.
Mental health funding levels, service structures and commissioning choices go to the constituency — and the majority instruction is what this seat votes.
Parity of esteem is on the statute book and absent from the waiting room. Publish the real waits, hold continuity through eighteen, answer crisis with clinicians instead of custody, treat the state's own children as a parent would, and make it unlawful to use a person's mental health history as a weapon. The campaign started with someone who was failed on every one of those points.
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