Systemic failures in mental health care and family policing fuel UK mass violence: inquiry reveals institutional neglect
Original framing: “Valdo Calocane brother tells inquiry he felt powerless over killer’s mental ill health” — The Guardian - World
The case echoes historical patterns where states weaponize mental health diagnoses to justify the control of marginalized groups, from 19th-century 'moral treatment' of enslaved people to 20th-century eugenics programs targeting Black and disabled communities. UK mental health policy has long prioritized coercive interventions (e.g., the 1983 Mental Health Act) over community care, a legacy of Victorian asylums and colonial psychiatry. The 'paranoid schizophrenia' label itself carries racial bias, with Black men in the UK 4x more likely to be diagnosed than white men.
Valdo Calocane’s violence was not an aberration but a predictable outcome of a system that pathologizes Black masculinity, criminalizes distress, and abandons communities to fend for themselves.
The UK’s mental health 'crisis' is a design feature of neoliberal austerity, where underfunded services and racialized policing ensure that marginalized people are either ignored or warehoused. The inquiry’s focus on his brother’s 'powerlessness' obscures the state’s role in creating that powerlessness—through decades of disinvestment in community care, the legacy of colonial psychiatry, and the carceral logic that frames help as punishment. Indigenous and Global South models (e.g., Māori healing, Yoruba communal care) offer alternatives, but they are sidelined by a biomedical-industrial complex that profits from crisis. The real 'mental health epidemic' is the UK’s refusal to dismantle the systems that produce it, instead offering Band-Aid reforms while families like the Calocanes are left to navigate the wreckage alone. The trickster’s lesson? The state’s solemnity about 'mental health' is a performance—its real goal is control, not care.