Dr Mayura Deshpande | 25 June 2026
Dr Mayura Deshpande will speak on how mental health homicide inquiries assess causality.
* This event will be held online via Zoom.
Speaker
Dr Mayura Deshpande
Dr Mayura Deshpande is a consultant in forensic psychiatry and the National Specialty Advisor in secure care to NHS England. She is chair of the Adult Secure Clinical Reference Group and works with clinicians and commissioners to advise NHS England on matters to do with inpatient low, medium and high secure forensic services and community forensic services.
Dr Deshpande works clinically in a low secure service in Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, a large provider of community and mental health services in Hampshire and is the Caldicott Guardian for the Trust. She has previously held a number of senior management posts in the Trust. She is also an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Southampton where her research interests include patient safety and mental health homicide investigation methodology.
She has a longstanding interest in ethics and law, and was, until April 2022, chair of the RCPsych Professional Practice & Ethics Committee. She is currently the College’s Associate Registrar for Policy and its lead for the Invited Review Service.
Inferring Causality in Mental Health Homicide Inquiries
Non-statutory independent mental health homicide inquiries routinely make attributions of causality, but it is not clear how they do this. Issues such as poor risk assessment, poor communication between agencies, poor communication with families, poor record-keeping and poor care planning are routinely identified as root causes of mental health homicides.
There appears to be an assumption of linear causality, where a cause leads to an effect in a measurable, foreseeable, understandable way; this is held to be symmetrical, in that, it is assumed that the cause-effect relationship will hold if we work backwards as happens in an inquiry.
However, is this correct? Dr Deshpande will examine this briefly with reference to safety science, emergent causality, and counterfactuals.
The event will be recorded.
If you are no longer able to attend, please release your ticket, so that someone else may attend. Spaces are limited.