New Prevent guidance overrules doctors about neurodivergence, mental illness

16th March 2026

Rights & Security International has serious concerns about the government’s updated ‘Key Principles of Prevent’ guidance, published in February 2026. Prevent remains a vast, rights-violating programme for surveilling mainly children, and this guidance contains significant flaws that risk undermining the clinical expertise of doctors and psychologists while entrenching discrimination against neurodivergent people. In doing so, it risks causing lasting damage to disabled and neurodivergent children who — along with their families — are pulled into Prevent, often without any legitimate justification: statistics show that most Prevent referrals result in no further action.

Most worryingly, the guidance groups neurodivergence together with mental health conditions as generic ‘vulnerabilities’ in a counter-terrorism context. This is clinically inaccurate and dangerous. First, ‘mental ill-health’, as the government refers to it, is a sweeping term, and most mental health conditions do not make a person any more dangerous than anyone else. Second, neurodivergence — including autism and ADHD — is not a mental health condition, and framing it as a risk factor in this way reinforces harmful stereotypes that we know already drive the over-policing of autistic children and adults. 

We are also concerned that the guidance positions the police, via Prevent, as the ultimate experts on whether someone who is neurodivergent or has mental health problems may pose a danger to themselves or others. It implies, incorrectly, that doctors and mental health professionals do not already consider both of these risks, and insists that the police are better placed to make a judgment about whether someone might harm themselves or others. This is wrong: police are not medical or mental health professionals, and experienced clinicians often have far more comprehensive knowledge of a person’s circumstances than the police or others involved in Prevent assessments do.

Finally, by encouraging a low threshold for referrals without acknowledging the real harm that an unnecessary referral can cause to children, families and others, the guidance risks normalising surveillance of communities that already face bias — such as Muslim children and children from Asian or Black backgrounds — and eroding trust in public services.

We call on the government to retract these edicts about neurodivergent people and people with mental health conditions, and tackle violence in an effective, fact-based, unbiased manner. This is what everyone in the UK deserves.

Note: On 17 March 2026, RSI updated some of the terminology in the above statement to better reflect current practices when discussing mental health conditions.