Sir Norman Lamb: ‘Mental Health Care Is Broken’
Sir Norman Lamb: “Mental Health Care Is Broken”, And He’s Written the Blueprint to Fix It
Sir Norman Lamb spent three years as the UK’s Minister of State for Care and Support, five more as Chair of one of the country’s biggest mental health trusts, and a lifetime, he says, learning from his own family what the system gets wrong. This week he joined JustMentalTalk to talk about his new book, Be More Human, and to share, with striking honesty, the personal story behind it.
Who Is Sir Norman Lamb?
Norman Lamb was the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk for 18 years, and served as the UK’s Minister of State for Care and Support from 2012 to 2015. He was knighted in 2019 for services to mental health, and from March 2020 until his retirement in March 2025 he chaired South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), one of the UK’s largest mental health trusts. His new book, Be More Human: Why Mental Health Care Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, is published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
“My Family Taught Me What the System Gets Wrong”
Much of what shaped Sir Norman Lamb’s thinking happened at home. His son Archie was diagnosed with OCD at 15, and the family was told it could take up to six months to be seen by their local NHS mental health trust. “We were pretty desperate,” he told JustMentalTalk. “We couldn’t contemplate just leaving things for up to six months.” The family paid for private care, something he’s quick to point out most families simply can’t afford.
In 2015, his older sister Catherine died by suicide, after a period of severe depression that followed the death of their mother. She had spent around ten weeks as a voluntary inpatient on a locked mental health ward, in what Lamb has described as a “pretty dismal unit.” She took her own life some months after her discharge.
He speaks about Catherine with real warmth, a “lovely older sister,” a successful languages teacher who took him to his first football match. Be More Human is dedicated to her memory. “I hope I’m respecting her memory,” he said, “by trying to do something that I hope will lead to some good coming out of this very sad loss.”
If anything in this raises something for you, Lifeline (NI) is free and available 24/7 on 0808 808 8000, and Samaritans on 116 123.
Why Sir Norman Lamb Says Mental Health Care Is Broken
When Lamb arrived as Chair at SLaM in March 2020, he asked the trust’s medical director to focus more on preventing ill health. The answer: “We’re not commissioned to do that.” It’s a moment he returns to in the book as proof that a system built to respond to crisis, rather than prevent it, was never going to work.
Be More Human puts four questions at the centre of its argument: why we do so little to prevent the social causes of mental illness; why prescribing of antidepressants has nearly doubled in a decade; why physical and mental health are treated as separate problems when they’re so often linked; and why coercion and institutionalisation remain the default response to crisis.
The figures he sets out are stark. People living with severe mental illness die, on average, 15 to 20 years earlier than the general population, a gap that, he says, hasn’t narrowed in decades. And roughly £100 million is spent every year sending patients out of their own area for care, sometimes hundreds of miles from home. He tells the story of Steve Downs, a Norfolk journalist who, after a suicide attempt, was left waiting three days for a bed before being driven, late at night, to a hospital over a hundred miles away.
What Be More Human Says Could Work Instead
The second half of the book is deliberately hopeful. Lamb points to Trieste in northern Italy, where open-access community mental health centres have all but eliminated out-of-area placements, waiting lists and the use of restraint. He highlights a service in Norway, built by psychologist Birgit Valla around a single question, “What matters to you?”, that helps people without a referral, a diagnosis or a waiting list. And he tells the story of a Gateshead Council team that, instead of chasing families in arrears with threatening letters, picked up the phone and simply asked how they could help.
He’s equally clear that people with lived experience, not just professionals, have a crucial role to play, citing campaigner Holly Berrigan and GP Laura Marshall-Andrews, who prescribes choirs and nature walks alongside medicine.
Sir Norman Lamb’s Message to JustMentalTalk Listeners
Asked what he’d say to someone struggling right now, his answer was simple: “Reach out, talk to people… Communication, and at our heart as human beings, relationships make us, don’t they? It might just be saving a life.”
Listen to the Full Conversation
You can watch or listen to the full conversation with Sir Norman Lamb on JustMentalTalk now:
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Be More Human is out now, published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. You can buy it directly from the publisher, or from Amazon, Waterstones and Bookshop.org:
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This episode discusses suicide. If you’re affected by anything you’ve read here, Lifeline (NI) is free and available 24 hours a day on 0808 808 8000, and Samaritans are there any time on 116 123.
