My friend and colleague Suman Fernando, who died at the age of 92, had an international reputation in the field of monetary psychiatry, especially with regard to the call for ethnic property rights to mental health.
As well as being a consultant psychiatrist in NHS For more than 20 years, Suman wrote 14 books and many articles that he stabbed in a constant and methodological racism in providing British mental health.
In his first book, race and culture in society (1988), discovered the role of race and culture in how people experience mental health problems and services. In his book of penetration 1991, mental healthRace and culture, challenging the dominance and uniqueness of the medical model, and argued that any service response to minority communities must also focus on social, cultural and institutional issues.
Suman has often installed the Western and individual idea of mental illness with global or original healing systems that see the seizure of society’s cohesion as causal, with more spiritual and societal responses. It should be noted that the inclusion of relatively modern practices such as mind and yoga in the recovery of mental health in the West is exactly the one that supported the original population models for several centuries.
Suman was born in Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and the son of Charles, a doctor, and his wife, Issmi (Ni de Mail). He joined the royal college in Colombo, then followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who studied medicine in the United Kingdom. He is studying at Cambridge University and University University Hospital in London, and qualified in 1958.
After he briefly returned to Ceylon to work in her only psychological hospital, on the outskirts of Colombo, he returned in 1960 to the United Kingdom, as he married the following year to Francis Livord, who met him for the first time when they were students at the University University Hospital.
He works as a psychiatrist at NHS at the Chis Farm Hospital in Infield, north of London, and became a colleague at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he received MD from Cambridge University based on his studies in psychiatry through culture. He retired in 1997.
Suman remained in a profound contact with his Sri Lankan heritage and supports many institutions and projects in the country, especially the People’s Rural Development Association, which he played a major role in establishing in 2007. He was also a shock partner and the global health program organized by McGill University in Montreal, Canada, which brought mental health training.
Suman first met in Sri Lanka in the nineties, where we were accomplished a voluntary work. He was a warm, modest and generous person, saved all.
He survived Francis, his daughter, Siri, Haidan, Nathan and Alec, his brother Sunmal and his sister Sosela.
