A Fulfilling Life, What Matters to Me: Experiences of Black men with a Severe Mental Illness in Lambeth

In 2024, Healthwatch Lambeth undertook a qualitative research project talking to 30 Black men with a Severe Mental Illness (SMI) about their experiences of using mental health services. The aim was to understand the support that Lambeth’s Black African and Caribbean service users with SMI need to recover, stay well and lead a fulfilling life.

Key findings

Men described delays in accessing support due to stigma, distrust, and cultural expectations around strength and resilience. Those who did engage found the mental health system difficult to navigate, facing inconsistent access to care, long waits, and limited crisis and follow-up support.  

Experiences of care varied - men valued feeling listened to and included in care decisions, but more often found care to be impersonal, unwelcoming, focused mainly on medication over talking therapies and marked by experiences pointing to racial bias. Hospital care was described in similar terms, as coercive, lacking in cultural sensitivity and poorly managed, especially during discharge.

Men saw the journey to recovery as more than symptom management. It involved regaining control, improving access to healthcare, receiving personalised and respectful care and accessing ongoing support in the community, alongside obtaining stability in housing, employment, and finances.

Recommendations

Healthwatch Lambeth recognise the hard work of healthcare professionals and community support staff to provide care to all mental health service users and the initiatives already taking place in Lambeth to improve equity. However, our conversations with Black men show there is room for improvement.  

Recommendations resulting from Black men’s feedback include: 

• Improve cultural competency, through ongoing training for healthcare staff, regular reflection and acting on service user feedback.
• Strengthen primary care support, through direct access to GPs and mental health nurses.
• Improve secondary care access, through self-referrals, continuity of care, and clear personalised discharge plans involving carers where relevant.
• Promote community support, through increased availability of safe spaces and peer support.
• Increase mental health awareness, through information campaigns and training for employers and health providers.
• Support employment and skills, through mentoring and apprenticeship programmes.
• Drive systemic change, through frameworks like PCREF and by measuring and reporting on progress.

See below to read the full report and the response from the Mental Health Integrated Commissioning team – South East London Integrated Care Board (Lambeth) and Lambeth Council.