![The Guardian | N Lees](https://ifp.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/1-47-1024x592.jpg)
What I was sent by the Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk was about their calls for a criminal investigation into an apparent scandal that decisively surfaced over the summer, centred on the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS foundation trust (or NSFT), which sees to mental health provision across those two very large English counties. It is centred on the “unexpected” deaths of 8,440 people between April 2019 and October 2022, all of whom were either under the care of the trust, or had been up to six months before they died. The story of the failures that led to that statistic date back at least a decade; the campaign says it amounts to nothing less than “the largest deaths crisis in the history of the NHS”.