Allocating mental health resources based on racial assumptions

[Sassiskt]

We had a thread last week where the charity Young Minds declined an application for services due to the applicant not being ‘culturally diverse’ enough. Many posters were pompously told that many from culturally diverse backgrounds struggled to access services and that’s why this white middle class posters child was declined.

Many others pointed out that it would be fairer for every applicant to be treated as an individual with individual needs, and not as a stereotype of any aspect of their identity. I did therefore find it interesting to read that Valdo Colcane was not sectioned despite showing text book symptoms of extreme psychosis due to the fact that we apparently section too many black people and they didn’t want to seem racist.

When are we going to get to a stage where we are assessed for who we are and they symptoms we are displaying without someone with a quota deciding that we are too white / black / middle class / straight / gay / Irish etc etc to have X wrong with us? Since when did the public sector develop such tunnel vision and see us as just statistic probabilities rather than people? It’s so demeaning. And in this case if had tragic results. I hope all involved are reassessing their farcical, dangerous actions.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/23/nottingham-killer-valdo-calocane-race-mental-health-inquiry

The Calocane case is so upsetting. Those beautiful young adults, and treasured dad, murdered on the streets. I often think about them and their families and feel so angry at the injustice.

Back to your point, YANBU. Race should NEVER play a part in things like this. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Very upsetting- especially to read about the teenagers trying so hard to help each other. Then the killer going on to attack another victim, an older chap.
Tragic waste of lives and shouldn't have happened.
Their poor families

I think the killers family deserve a lot of respect too. They tried damn hard to get him sectioned if I recall correctly and we’re not helped at all.

Well, I think it’s okay for charities to have specific remits where they focus their resources. There are plenty of charities specific to women’s health or men’s health. Or gay men’s health. There’s an amazing mental health charity near me set up by the family of a woman who sadly took her life. You have to be 25 and under to access their services. I’m part of a health charity that only serves people 20-49.

I think there is a difference with being racist and providing culturally appropriate services to specific groups. I mean, everyone seems to love when charities will only serve biological women. Is it really different to say that a charity is only serving the South Asian community?

It also can't be a one size fits all service. A friend of mine follows a particular faith, and provides counselling and CBT to women of the same faith. She set it up as a private practice after finding services she tried to use just didn't work for her when she needed them. From hearing her talk about her own experiences I can totally understand why there's a need. The NHS and local counselling available for her at the time technically accepted her referral but they may as well have only been funded for white British atheists, given the lack of understanding of the cultural context to mental health that she experienced.

The issue is that the core NHS services have been dismantled, meaning that the charity sector is left to pick up the pieces and isn't in a position to cover all bases. It was never intended for that.

All public services and my workplace ask for certain characteristics- race, ethnicity religion, and disabilities, gender, sexual orientation etc and I always state ‘prefer not to say’ because I’d far rather they concentrated on who I am as a person rather than my background. whenever I see this I assume they have some boxes they’ve been asked to tick, and they’d get a big tick in the disabilities box and a big tick in the sexual orientation box. I don’t want any aspect of my life to give me preferential treatment over any other equally valid candidate for a job or applicant for funding just because I’m a lesbian with only one one hand fgs. I’m about so much more than my disability of my sexual orientation.

Ticking those boxes wouldn't give you preferential treatment though. It means as a wider group people can be disadvantaged, because if say one person tries to challenge that the organisation isn't doing enough to support employees who have disabilities, the organisation can say 'as far as we understand we don't have many people to support so we're doing fine'. Which is pretty much what happened in our organisation recently!

Having a protected characteristic doesn't mean you're only defined by that characteristic, but it's very naive to say that it could never be relevant. Gender is a protected characteristic. I can't imagine many women would say that 'being a women' is the only relevant thing about them or how they want to be defined, but it doesn't mean that they shouldn't have specific services, such as for pregnancy or menopause. Do you think we should get rid of women's aid because it's only providing to women and not men?

Gender isn't a protected characteristic. Sex is. And gender reassignment is, but not gender.

Ok, but I don't think it changes the point that wanting to be seen as a whole person and not 'just' as a woman doesn't mean it's not also important to provide some services and funding that are specific for women. Just the same as there will be needs that are specific, or need to be more specialised, for people in relation to race and culture.

I’m not looking for preferential treatment. I just think it’s really abhorrent to direct services to or away from any particular group based on overall statistics of the group. We aren’t a group. We are individuals with individual needs and should be judged on that.

My workplace is quite open that it wants disability figures as it wants to ensure its hiring the right proportion of disabled staff. I don’t want a leg up in the workplace due to a physical abnormality that has no impact on my ability to do my job. I don’t want my workplace to be able to boast about hiring me either. I’m good at my job and should be hired for that reason.

Having said that I have a registered blind colleague who is phenomenal at her job and has the company handing her anything she needs at whatever cost to help her. A workplace who helps disabled people to be able to give their best should be applauded.

The charity in question was set up for all young people with MH issues and not specifically for "culturally diverse" young people yet they are specifically discriminating against children who don't fit their new unwritten criteria which they can't even explain themselves. Thats different from a charity that was set up for a specific ethnic subset of young people with MH problems.

Charities rely on funding though. And if they haven't secured a contract or grant to serve the wider group they were originally set up for, but they still have funding for a small specific group, what should they do, close?

@Sassiskt I'm struggling to follow your point to be honest. I only mentioned 'preferential treatment' because you gave not declaring because you didn't want preferential treatment. Which isn't what the boxes are for and you wouldn't have been given anyway. You might have been offered different treatment but only to ensure that things were equal, not to give you a 'leg up'. And I'm still unsure what that has to do with why you think the mental health charity is wrong for providing services according to what they've secured funding for, until they can get more funding.

Gender is not a protected characteristic and should not be asked about on a diversity questionnaire as its a gdpr breach to hold that irrelevant data.
Sex however is a protected characteristic and is allowed to be asked about on diversity monitoring forms, its also the characteristic that you were confusing with gender.
The WI have just had to kick all the men out who claim to have a gender identity because they were being sued by a man without a gender identity who they wouldn't let join and they were about to lose and faced losing their charitable status because they were allowing a subset of men join against their charitable aims as set out in their founding charter, so probably not the best example for you to use

That would be a fair point if they weren't 90% funded by the NHS for all young people and if they could explain what they ment by "culturally diverse" which when asked they couldn't

I think we are seeing an interesting problem becoming an issue that we haven't really had to address in the past in the same way.

I don't really agree that the real issue is cuts to government services. That has certainly made the problem come out more clearly but the underlying question is still there. There will always be limits to spending and the need to make choices about funding, so how do we make sure services offerered are fair?

That underlying question is around what is ok or not ok in terms of offering health services according to characteristics that are legally protected. In particular, how direct the relationship needs to be between the service and the medical need.

Everyone recognises that there can be needs like this, we don't need to offer services for the visually impaired to those with normal vision, it would not be more "fair" and it would be a waste of resources. But what about when the relationship is less direct? How do we decide what counts as a "need". Because in the end, services are for individuals who need them, not for abstract groupings.

The big issue in this example is if there is private money being offered to health care services, to what extent is it allowed that the donor can determine who is allowed to benefit from those funds, especially when it involves a characteristic that is is not legal to discriminate on the basis of.

I don’t think they should take any funding that has strings attached as to who they can help. That’s immoral.

If they are a Bangladeshi women’s charity given money to be used on Bangladeshi women that’s fine. If you’re a mainstream charity and accepting funding which makes you restrict the use of that funding to a very small subset then that really isn’t fine.

The funded can either decide to keep their funding, give it to a charity that is set up for the niche they want to fund, or they can be more humane and decide to fund people who need help, not societal groups.

For your first paragraph, one option might be to say that funding can be limited by medical need, but not group characteristics. In particular, when donating the funds to be used by a body like the NHS.

So, I can say, I am raising money for people with sickle cell disease. I can't say, I am raising money for black people with sickle cell disease.

Which would effectively be a limit on what kinds of funds groups like the NHS could accept, and maybe even a limit on private health care providers.

Similar thing with Southport ( I refuse to use his name) His school teachers knew he was dangerous but were forced to strike it from their report because it was deemed to be racist. Of course we know what happened next..
The person responsible for this should be charged with being an accessory 😡

I don't quite see this as being similar? It's not good, but it's a different kind of problem.

No charity should be applying for funding that doesn’t match its charitable objects though.

And they certainly shouldn’t be withholding services on arbitrary or discriminatory grounds using ‘funding’ as an excuse.

Quite. And in the same way that it is generally unlawful discrimination to withhold requested services on grounds of race (even if that race is Caucasian) , it should be unlawful discrimination to not apply the usual standards for public safety and detain dangerous people.

Sadly, due to a decision based on some imagined ‘race quota’, 3 people were murdered by Valdo Calocane.

Yes, you’d be amazed at how many people I’ve come across that are unable to comprehend or accept that fact.

Why would applying for funding that supports mental health be against their charitable aims?
And 'funding' isn't used as an excuse, they are legally bound to honour whatever parameters are set by the provider. If they apply for a grant where the provider has specified the funding is to be used to support female victims of domestic abuse for example, they aren't allowed to use that money to provide support to male victims. If they want to do that, they have to find another funding stream. Charities apply for as much as they can but there's no guarantees.
Charities have to adjust their services all the time, when I worked for homeless charities we rarely got funding for more than two years at a time from a council, or grants that would cover costs of a particular project for more than a year. It was always a balancing act.

Curious why you think its arbitrary and discriminatory if it's providing a service to a particular ethnic group, and not say, if it's a women's charity that isn't providing services to men or non binary people. And if it's because you think that it's because the charity wasn't set up to only support that ethnic group, what if the reason was that a different charity won the grant they'd previously relied on, as that's a common issue? Or perhaps the grant no longer exists, should they close because the only way to be 'fair' is to make sure no one gets any help?

Also I'm not sure if the reference is to MIND as in the national charity or the local branches, but in our area MIND definitely don't receive the majority of their funding from NHS. There's different mental health charities that have the contracts with the NHS, some of who focus on 16-24 year olds, and some who focus on adults with drug and alcohol addictions so I'm guessing you'd want them to be shut down for discrimination too. There's very little 'generic' support in our area (other than the MH support via a GP)

If thats the case they need to change their charitable objectives, they can't just stop helping a subsect of their core service group because they choose to apply for a specific type of funding that excludes 1 subsect or another.
Think of it this way a MH charity is set up for all young people but takes a grant thats just for white people so they say to all black people we only have funding for whites so we cant help you anymore even though our charitable aims are to support both white and black young people with MH problems, surely you could understand why that would be wrong.
Oh BTW if the non binary person is female then by law a women's charity cant refuse them service as that would be illegal discrimination, it would be legal discrimination to exclude any male non binary people from a woman's charity as they are men