Celebrating the life and legacy of Dr Suman Fernando: a pioneer in critical mental health theory and practice
Few individuals have reshaped the way we think about mental health, culture, and social justice as profoundly as Dr Suman Fernando (1930–2025). A psychiatrist, scholar, and activist, Suman’s work redefined the boundaries of psychology and psychiatry by putting race, culture, and community at the centre of care. His legacy extends well beyond academia into policymaking, clinical practice, and the ongoing global movement to decolonise mental health.
Careif honoured this work by holding an event on Saturday 13 September to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr Fernando. Careif has produced two films relating to this event. One of which is included below and interviews three leading clinicians and consultants, Dr Rashmi Shankar, Hari Sewell and Professor Kam Bhui. They each discuss how they were influenced by Suman and his work and one which is a recording of the entire event that featured 20 speakers from around the world
Early life and education
Born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Suman Fernando grew up at a cultural crossroads that would later inspire his lifelong concern with the intersection of identity and well-being. Having moved to the United Kingdom, he made a transition that would shape his professional path and his political consciousness. He studied medicine at the University of Cambridge where he developed a deep interest in how mental distress was understood differently across societies.
Later, training in psychiatry in London exposed Suman to the growing tensions around culture, migration, and racial difference in British mental-health services during the post-war decades. These experiences planted the seeds of his critical inquiry: Why did so many people from ethnic-minoritised backgrounds experience disproportionate rates of psychiatric diagnosis and institutionalization? How could mental health systems truly serve a diverse and multicultural society?
Challenging racism in psychiatry
By the late 1970s and 1980s, Suman Fernando emerged as one of the few psychiatrists publicly challenging the racial biases embedded in British psychiatry. He was among the first to show, through both data and personal testimony, that Black and Asian communities were systematically failed by diagnostic tools and treatment methods designed around Eurocentric assumptions.
In his seminal work, Race and Culture in Psychiatry (1988), Suman dissected the structural racism that pervaded the discipline, exposing how “difference” was too often pathologised. He called for a radical transformation away from a “colour-blind” model of psychiatry toward one that recognized cultural context as essential to understanding mental distress.
His ideas were not without resistance. At a time when mainstream psychiatry largely dismissed questions of race as “political” or “irrelevant,” Suman’s critique was both intellectually and morally courageous. Yet, over the decades, his arguments became foundational to modern cultural-psychiatric thinking and the practical reforms that followed in UK mental-health policy.
Champion of community and cultural psychiatry
Dr Fernando’s career combined academic brilliance with a commitment to community-based practice. He served as Consultant Psychiatrist at Chase Farm and St Ann’s Hospitals in North London, where he implemented culturally sensitive approaches to care and worked closely with local voluntary and community organisations.
He was also deeply involved in the creation of more inclusive institutions. As a founding member of the Transcultural Psychiatry Society (UK) and later as he trained a new generation of mental-health professionals at a range of academic institutions, to view culture not as a problem to be managed but as a resource for healing.
His later books all cemented his position as a thought leader in the global movement toward equitable, context-sensitive mental health care. Suman’s writing offered both critique and hope: critique of the colonial legacies that continued to govern mental-health systems, and hope for a future where practitioners engage collaboratively with the people and cultures they serve.
Decolonising mental health
In his later years, Suman became a leading voice in the intellectual movement now known as the decolonisation of mental health. He argued that Western psychiatry’s dominance, meaning its frameworks, diagnoses, and institutional hierarchies often overshadowed indigenous and community-based ways of understanding distress.
He urged practitioners to “decentre the West”, to learn from the wisdom embedded in non-Western philosophies of mind, spirituality, and healing. His cross-cultural approach influenced global discussions from the World Health Organization’s social determinants of mental health to NGO programmes in Sri Lanka, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean.
A personal legacy of compassion and integrity
To those who knew him personally, Suman Fernando was not merely a scholar or clinician he was a mentor, a listener, and a fierce defender of humanity’s shared dignity. Former students and colleagues remember him as someone who challenged institutions but always with kindness and humility. He modelled what it means to “humanise” psychiatry.
His passing in 2025 was felt deeply in professional and activist circles alike, prompting the Careif memorial event and renewed calls to embed anti-racist practice into the heart of mental-health policy. Yet Suman’s spirit lives on wherever clinicians question their assumptions, wherever communities demand culturally grounded care, and wherever mental health is affirmed as a human right rather than a privilege.
Continuing his vision
Honouring Dr Suman Fernando’s legacy today means more than celebrating his achievements it means continuing his unfinished work. It means building services that are inclusive, accountable, and responsive to the cultural realities of people’s lives. It means teaching future professionals that mental health cannot be separated from history, inequality, and belonging.
As Suman himself often said, “Mental health has to do with how we connect-to ourselves, to each other, and to the world.” His life remains a testament to that belief: that through compassion, reflection, and courage, psychiatry can be not just a science of the mind, but a force for justice.
