Mind Chief Admits Charities 'Softened the Truth' on Violence Risk as Nottingham Attacks Inquiry Nears Its End

The head of one of Britain's largest mental health charities says her own sector has been dodging an uncomfortable truth for years: some people with severe mental illness do turn violent, and pretending otherwise has cost lives.

Dr Sarah Hughes, chief executive of Mind for the past four years and a nearly four-decade veteran of the field, told The Guardian in an exclusive interview that mental health organizations have "failed to acknowledge that violence does happen in some circumstances." Her comments land as the public inquiry into the 13 June 2023 Nottingham attacks nears its conclusion.

Valdo Calocane fatally stabbed 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar, along with 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates. He also tried to run down three more people with a stolen van. Calocane was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and, in 2024, was handed an indefinite hospital order after admitting three counts of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility and three counts of attempted murder.

The inquiry has spent months hearing from local authorities, police, health professionals, and Calocane's own family about what went wrong before the attack. The record is damning: Calocane had a documented history of violent incidents, repeatedly refused medication, and was sectioned four separate times over a two-year span. His mother, Celeste Calocane, testified in May that the mental health system was "so broken."

Hughes says the charity sector's instinct to protect people with mental illness from stigma has, at times, meant burying the harder conversation. "As a sector, [we] have held the narrative that the majority of people don't commit violent crime," she told The Guardian. "However, some do and the consequences are grave."

She added that the sector had "softened the truth" while fighting discrimination, and that difficult topics around violence had been "brushed under the carpet." Mind recently convened a roundtable of experts in Westminster to discuss how mental health services can protect both patients and the public.

Emma Webber, Barnaby's mother, welcomed Hughes's statement, saying danger to others has been "almost deliberately quietened down in the conversation in the past." She has argued that if the risks in Calocane's case had been properly understood, the attacks might never have happened.

The strongest counterargument to Hughes's framing, and the one mental health advocates have made for years, is that emphasizing violence risk can deepen stigma against a group that is overwhelmingly not dangerous. That concern is real and grounded in decades of data showing people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

Seena Fazel, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Oxford who attended Mind's roundtable, put a number on it: people with schizophrenia do carry an elevated violence risk compared to the general population, but the absolute risk remains small, and "only a minority will commit a serious violent act." Hughes herself made the same point, insisting that recognizing risk in a minority of cases should not translate into blanket restrictions or renewed discrimination against the mentally ill as a whole.

Most outlets covering this story, including The Guardian, Bytes Europe, and thebritisheye, stuck closely to Hughes's own framing: a charity sector admitting it downplayed risk to protect against stigma.

A commentary piece in the Epoch Times by Theodore Dalrymple took the story in a different direction, alleging that Calocane went untreated in part because clinicians were reluctant to compulsorily treat a black patient and worsen statistics on the over-representation of black men in psychiatric detention. No evidence in the inquiry testimony described in these sources ties Calocane's race to decisions about his care.

What the inquiry evidence does establish, without dispute, is a documented pattern: four sectionings in two years, repeated medication refusal, and a string of prior violent incidents before the fatal attack. The inquiry is expected to issue findings on what "events, acts and omissions" allowed that pattern to end in three deaths. No publication date for the final report has been confirmed in these sources.