Suman Fernando, Beloved friend, colleague and Icon 31st March1932 to 31 January 2025
In 1992, I met Suman for the first time. My colleague Errol Francis had organised a training session in South Buckinghamshire. I had read Dr Suman Fernando’s writings before. It was before LinkedIn or a time when we looked people up online. All I had were the incisive eloquently critical and powerful words. If his words were a person, to me, they were a 6 foot+ Black man with a reverberating baritone voice, probably with dreadlocks. When Errol walked into the training room with Dr Fernando, I experienced cognitive dissonance. The Suman Fernando I met was a slightly built Sri Lankan man, with a much softer voice than I had imagined. I often joked with Suman about this. His spirit was so gigantic that his mortal flesh could not contain him. 31stJanuary 2025 saw the ultimate freeing of his spirit from his body.
Suman Fernando was born in Sri Lanka and came to England in the 1960s. As a brown person (a term he used), he collected a bunch of advice and warnings about how to get on, by avoiding being a troublemaker and just keeping his head down. That worked well, didn’t it?
Suman practiced as a Consultant Psychiatrist in Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield. As someone who maintained a critical perspective and practice, with the intention of working towards race equity, Suman was struck by something. One day he and colleagues embarked on an audit of key data around race equity in mental health, just to see how their race equity practice was showing up. The data showed that in comparison with other services there was no significant difference. A team of people whose individual practice was pursuing race equity, wasn’t effective in mitigating the underpinning assumptions, theories, policies and practices in psychiatry. By the time Suman completed Institutional Racism in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology around thirty years later in 2017, his analysis, and legacy of attending to the challenges of race inequity within mental health system was well established and documented in over 14 authored or edited books, numerous dozens of published essays and articles. He was a prolific writer, often partnering with, and centring racialised people with lived experience of mental health problems.
From the 1980s Suman was active in, and leading campaigns for social justice and equity in mental health. He was involved in the Transcultural Psychiatry Society, Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label and worked with Race on the Agenda and Afiya Trust and many groups and organisations with race equity as central aims. He was on the committee of the black perspectives service, Ipamo Project in Lambeth, where I was chair (suman wrote about this experience in his 2017 publication). Dr Ferando was academic, with a sharp mind. He was awarded an honorary professorial role by London Metropolitan university, but Suman did not use the title Professor himself much, if at all.
Suman was outspoken, to the point that in certain corridors of power he was persona non grata, and for a while you will note that despite his eminence in the field of race equity in mental health, he was not included in some official consultation and working groups. We had worked together on the development of the National Service Framework for Mental Health (1999). He was vocal about the way in which people with lived experience were in his view, sidelined in the process. Suman was not about status for himself. He called out national mental health charities, he rejected an OBE with a public letter published by The Guardian. He was outspoken about the Government’s decision to not proceed with the 1999 Richardson review of the Mental Health Act 1983. Genevra Richardson brought a rights-based approach to the front of the possible mental health legislation. Richardson is a lawyer, and it was a departure to have another discipline other than medicine leading the review of mental health law. The refusal of Westminster to proceed with the Richardson Review symbolised to Suman something about the focus on procedural aspects rather than the people whose lives were affected by use of mental health law.
Undimmed by the struggle, Suman was active in agitating and seeking race equity in the Wesley Review of the Mental Health Act, which reported in December 2018.
There was a period in the 2000s when Suman stepped out of the arena of the constant battle for race equity in mental health. He was interested in trauma in communities post-disasters, like in his birth home Sri Lanka. He continued to write but accepted few speaking engagements on race equity in mental health in the UK.
The book Critical Psychiatry and mental health: Exploring the work of Suman Fernando in clinical practice(Moodley & Ocampo (eds) 2014) was a landmark publication that served as a reminder that his teachings were very active in the arena even when he personally wasn’t.
In 2008 after Suman wrote the foreword for my first book we became close and our friendship grew. There is a formidable network of people who have been the collective shoulder upon which I stand in my work on racial justice in mental health. However, anyone who has a sense of my journey knows that I am significantly shaped by Suman and his work. When he decided that he needed to hand over responsibility and ownership of the website www.Decolpsych.com he asked me. He then proceeded to speak of it as something that he and I developed. I was involved yes, I did suggest title but DecolPsych is Suman’s vision come true; to have a live dynamic, freely available resource of educational material in forms such as peer reviewed articles, blogs, thought pieces. In the month before his passing, we spoke about keeping the website as something alive and evolving. That is one thing he really wanted.
There is much unseen footage from a documentary (still with the producer) that I hope does eventually see the light of day and there is a charming podcast he and I did in 2021. This is on YouTube (The Seasoning the Reasoning Podcast). I smile every time I think of it because Suman afterwards chuckled and said I got him to say things he doesn’t usually say. We had some great smiles and laughs together.
Suman and my colleague Rachel Tribe, and I celebrated Suman’s 90th birthday in 2022 after he and I co-delivered a lecture at the University of East London. He didn’t want to get paid. If the money could be given to a cause, that would be better he said. And anyway, the administrative task to get paid was just an irritation.
I said to Suman several times in the last few years that I was giving him his flowers. Over all the decades, he refused any idea of any institute, film or award being made as a celebration of his name. Then in December 2024, the last time I saw him, my colleague Bhavna raised a conversation that the two of us had previously. Suman seemed relaxed and agreeable to an award to be given in his name.
Suman donated most of his extensive library the Welcome Trust. Suman’s last conversation with us in December 2024 centred a lot on his wish that people access these resources.
May my dear friend Suman rest in peace. I can’t help but conjure mental images of the awe and reverence afforded to him by the ancestors as they welcomed him.
Hári Sewell, HS Consultancy Ltd, February 2025
