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By Sayce Holmes-Lewis, Founder and CEO, Mentivity & London Policing Board Member
I have worked with young people in London for almost three decades across football, education, youth work and mentoring, and more recently policing, accountability and policy. Yet some of the language now used to understand young people simply were not widely known when I started.
Neurodiversity. Trauma-informed practice. Emotional dysregulation. ADHD. Racial trauma. Masking. Executive functioning.
The experiences behind those words are not new. What is relatively new is the language through which British institutions recognise and categorise them.
For many of us raised within African and Caribbean diasporic communities, mental health was not necessarily discussed through today’s clinical language. Distress could be understood through faith, family, spirituality or behaviour. Some responses provided powerful forms of collective care; others could create silence, shame or misunderstanding.
But we should be careful not to tell this history as though our communities had no knowledge until institutions gave us the terminology. African and Caribbean communities have longstanding traditions of kinship, spirituality, collective care and healing.
What we often lacked was influence over the institutions deciding which forms of knowledge were legitimate, which behaviours were considered normal and what happened when somebody fell outside those definitions.
Mental health does not exist in a vacuum, and neither do the systems
The experiences of African and Caribbean communities in Britain cannot be separated from histories of enslavement, colonialism and empire, or their contemporary consequences. Racism, poverty, housing inequality, school exclusion, insecure employment and displacement do not sit outside mental health. They shape the conditions within which wellbeing is protected or eroded.
Centre for Mental Health's ‘A Space to Be Me’ identifies racism, discrimination and poverty as risks to young Black people’s mental health.
Economic inequality must therefore be part of any serious conversation about mental-health disparities. Financial insecurity can mean overcrowding at home, parental stress, food insecurity and fewer safe places, pressures a child does not leave at the school gate. Yet institutions can encounter adverse behaviours without understanding the conditions surrounding it.
This becomes particularly important with neurodiversity. A child struggling to sit still becomes “disruptive”. Difficulty with executive functioning becomes “laziness”. Overwhelm becomes “aggression”. These descriptions are not neutral. They are judgements made through institutional ideas about acceptable behaviour, communication and learning.
Accountability and boundaries still matter. But greater understanding should make us question not only a young person’s behaviour, but the lens through which that behaviour is interpreted.
Race further shapes that interpretation. Black children can be perceived as older, more culpable and less vulnerable than their peers, a process often described as adultification. When vulnerability is overlooked, behaviour that should invite curiosity, care or safeguarding can instead attract punishment, exclusion or criminalisation.
If distress, trauma or neurodivergence is interpreted primarily as defiance, aggression or threat, institutional responses can become another source of harm. As situations escalate, the response can move from support and safeguarding towards restraint, detention or police intervention, which recreates the cycle of harm.
This is where race, mental health and policing become inseparable from questions of power and accountability.
Mental Health, Policing and Accountability
Sean Rigg died in 2008 following Metropolitan Police restraint in Brixton during a mental-health crisis. His inquest found the prone restraint used against him was unnecessary and unsuitable, and contributed more than minimally to his death.
Kevin Clarke died in Lewisham in 2018 following a mental-health crisis and police restraint, which his inquest named as a contributing factor.
Oladeji “Deji” Omishore died in 2022 after being Tasered by police on Chelsea Bridge and going into the Thames. His inquest found he was experiencing a mental-health relapse; the IOPC found no indication that officers’ conduct breached professional standards.
The circumstances and findings differ. But collectively they raise a question: what needs to exist before distress reaches the point where emergency, clinical or police systems become the response?
My community experience around policing and accountability has also shown me what can happen at the sharpest end of this continuum when opportunities for engagement were met with enforcement.
NHS Mental Health Act statistics for 2024/25 show Black or Black British people in England were detained at 262.4 per 100,000, compared with 65.8 for White people, almost four times the rate.
That statistic cannot explain every case. But disproportionality of this scale requires us to examine the system as well as the person experiencing it. Who is understood as vulnerable? Who is perceived as threatening? Whose distress receives care? Whose distress encounters force?
An investigation may conclude an individual case without resolving those wider questions. When disproportionate harm persists while institutional explanations remain incomplete, ambiguity becomes an accountability issue in itself.
It also requires us to look at what has disappeared before crisis occurs.
Third Spaces: Community infrastructure
What policy now describes as “third spaces” is not a new discovery for our communities. We have long understood the importance of places beyond formal institutions where relationships, identity, knowledge and belonging develop.
Growing up on the Aylesbury Estate, I experienced this through youth clubs, football cages, community centres, neighbours and elders. These were not simply places to keep young people occupied. They were part of the community’s own protective infrastructure.
A coach notices when someone stops attending. A youth worker recognises changed behaviour. An elder knows the family. These relationships can identify distress before it becomes a crisis, because they notice before institutional intervention is required.
This is what can be lost through regeneration and gentrification. Redevelopment is often measured through physical assets while the social assets being displaced remain invisible. When families are dispersed and community spaces disappear, accumulated relationships, cultural knowledge and informal systems of care can disappear with them.
In many circumstances, regeneration displaces the infrastructure that makes a community.
From Third Spaces to the First Sector
When I founded Mentivity in 2016, I looked at systemic problems in isolation, to be solved through mentoring, education and youth development. A decade later, I recognise we have now created an early-intervention ecosystem, by collaborating and developing services and spaces directly with community.
Relationships are our foundation.
A young person might engage through football, esports, mentoring, alternative provision, creative expression or simply spending time at Mentivity House. They do not need a diagnosis, referral or crisis to belong. We build rapport. Rapport creates understanding. Understanding enables trust. Trust creates belonging. Belonging creates the conditions for upskilling, early intervention and opportunity.
Relationship precedes intervention.
This is why I increasingly reject the hierarchy embedded within the term “third sector”. I call community organisations like ours the first sector organisations, because frequently we are there first: before exclusion, before a clinical threshold, before arrest and before hospitalisation. Increasingly, we also provide the much needed third spaces communities have lost with restricted resources.
Yet those with the greatest proximity can still have the least influence over the solution.
Redistributing Influence and Capital
For too long, communities have been researched, consulted, assessed and commissioned at, while decisions affecting them are made elsewhere. Strategies are developed, outcomes determined and funding allocated before those with the deepest proximity have meaningful influence over the response. These processes are extractive and harmful.
Community organisations do not lack expertise. Too often they lack capital, infrastructure and access to decision-making power. They hold relationships, cultural knowledge, lived experience and accumulated trust, yet these assets are rarely afforded the same legitimacy as institutional scale, financial reserves or professional credentials.
We need to redistribute influence alongside investment.
Changing Systems Requires a Decolonial Approach.
Decolonisation cannot simply mean changing terminology while leaving those structures intact. Communities should help define the problem, shape strategy, design responses and determine what success looks like. This is not about rejecting clinical, academic or statutory expertise. It is about ending the assumption that these are the only forms of expertise carrying authority.
The contradiction is stark: those with the greatest proximity can possess the greatest insight while holding the least capital and influence. The community must be at the forefront of systems change.
Invest Before Crisis
The Government’s Youth Matters: Your National Youth Strategy recognises trusted adults, belonging, safe spaces and earlier support. The challenge is translating those principles into sustained community infrastructure and meaningful influence.
Mentoring cannot compensate indefinitely for poverty. Youth work cannot solve insecure housing. A trusted adult cannot remove structural racism. A short-term programme cannot replace community infrastructure.
Early intervention must mean more than intervening earlier in crisis. It means intervening in the conditions that make crisis more likely.
We know more now than when I began this work. We have more language and a better understanding of neurodiversity, trauma, race, belonging and mental health. But language without influence will not redistribute power.
The question cannot simply be how we make young people more resilient. We must ask: what are we asking them to be resilient to, who has the power to change those conditions, and whose knowledge is trusted when solutions are designed?
If we wait until exclusion, arrest, detention, hospitalisation or crisis before surrounding young people with resources, we have already missed opportunities to act.
Protect and resource the third spaces. Invest in relationships. Value community knowledge. Redistribute influence and capital. Build the ecosystem before young people fall, and let us sustain it together for years to come.
References and further reading:
[1] https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/CentreforMH_ASpaceToBeMe.pdf
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/youth-matters-your-national-youth-strategy/youth-matters-your-national-youth-strategy
[3] https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-act-statistics-annual-figures/2024-25-annual-figures/detentions-differences-between-groups-of-people
[4] https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/publications/background-circumstances-sean-riggs-death
[5] https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/news/iopc-reopen-investigation-circumstances-surrounding-death-kevin-clarke
[6] https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/publications/investigation-police-contact-chelsea-bridge
