GET TO KNOW STEVE
About Steve Gilbert OBE MA
Steve is a keynote speaker on leadership, equity and organisational dynamics, and an adviser to boards and executive teams. Each talk draws on more than a decade of national reform, governance and consultancy, alongside lived experience of the systems Steve now helps to improve. Audiences leave with a clearer view of the decision in front of them and a practical first step.
National Mental Health Leadership and Governance
As Vice Chair of the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act, Steve deputised for the Chair, Sir Simon Wessely, oversaw four topic groups and co-chaired the African Caribbean working group on disproportionate detention. Steve then advised the Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice through the government response, and authored the White Paper section on mental health inequalities. With the reformed Act now law, Steve sits on the Expert Reference Group for its Code of Practice and chairs the Mental Health Working Group at UK Healthcare and Life Sciences Innovation.
Board service includes trustee roles at Mind, the Association of Mental Health Providers and Bipolar UK. Steve is also Lived Experience Co-Chair of the National Suicide Prevention Alliance.
Developing Anti-Racism Leaders
In June 2020, Steve joined a call with long-standing mental health policy colleagues. The conversation turned to the painful, lived experiences of people of Black and racialised ethnicities here in the UK, experiences that had gone unspoken in rooms like that for years. Nobody could speak. Then someone said: "I don't know how to fix this without making it worse."
Steve felt the same gap between knowing what must change and how to change it. The uncomfortable truth was that anti-racism had been work to pick up and put down. "Being anti-racist isn't something I do," Steve said. "It has to become who I am."
That decision shaped what followed including co-chairing Kooth plc's Diversity Council with the Chief Executive, co-chairing the NHS Race and Health Observatory's Mental Health Advisory Group, and founding Anti-Racism Leader Coaching to help leaders move from good intentions to measurable progress.
Qualified to Read the Room
Steve holds an MA in Consulting and Leading: Psychodynamic Approaches to Systems from the University of Essex. That training means Steve notices what a room is not saying: the anxiety, defensiveness and polite silence that race and mental health can provoke. Steve works with those reactions rather than around them, so senior leaders can admit what they do not yet know and leave ready to act.
What Drives Steve
Steve has lived with serious mental illness since late adolescence, including depression, bipolar disorder and suicidal crises, and has been detained under the Mental Health Act that Steve later helped to reform.
Growing up with a Black father and a white mother in a largely white neighbourhood, Steve rarely felt a sense of fitting in. Later came a harder realisation: the part racial discrimination played in the high rates of serious mental illness on Steve's father's side of the family.
These personal and family experiences drive the work. They give Steve an inside view of how systems fail people, and a clear sense of what it takes to get things right for those most affected. They have shaped 12 years of national work without defining it.
In 2019, Steve was appointed OBE for services to mental health.