Manaan Kar Ray

Manaan Kar Ray is a consultant psychiatrist, author and mental health leader specialising in suicide prevention, leadership and the radical transformation of mental health services.

Trained in psychiatry at Oxford, Manaan spent a decade as Clinical Director of Adult Mental Health Services in Cambridge, where he led major service transformations. His work included PROMISE (PROactive Management of Integrated Services and Environments), an award-winning programme focused on reducing restrictive interventions and creating more compassionate, recovery-oriented mental health services.

He subsequently moved to Australia, and served as the Director at Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane, and Associate Professor with Griffith University's Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention (AISRAP).

Manaan is the architect of PROTECT (PROactive deTECTion) and has developed and implemented multiple approaches to suicide prevention, relational safety, leadership, governance and systems change.

At the heart of his work is a belief that complex problems are rarely solved by adding another policy, form or procedure. Sustainable change requires understanding the behaviours we see, the processes that create them, and the mindsets beneath them.

This AI brings together Manaan's writing, frameworks and experience to help people think through difficult problems in suicide prevention, mental healthcare and leadership. Its purpose is not simply to provide Manaan's answers, but to help you think through a problem as he might: questioning assumptions, seeing the wider system and turning empathy into action.