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Louis Appleby CBE is a British Professor of Psychiatry who leads the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England and directs the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness. He runs the Centre for Mental Health and Safety at the University of Manchester.
Appleby was the government's first National Director for Mental Health ('mental health tsar') from 2000 to 2010, then the first National Clinical Director for Health and Criminal Justice from 2010 until 2014. He was also involved in the development of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies.
Activist Pete Shaughnessy and others in the mental health user/survivor movement reportedly found Appleby, in his role as mental health tsar, 'elusive'.
Appleby studied medicine at Edinburgh and trained in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He also trained in hospital medicine.
He is a non-executive director of the Care Quality Commission.
In February 2015 Appleby controversially announced on Twitter that he had pulled out of giving a presentation to the Ministry of Justice after being told not to mention falling staff numbers when discussing the rising suicide rate in prisons; he was supported by then shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan.
In December 2015 Appleby was appointed by the General Medical Council to improve how it deals with doctors who are vulnerable or at risk when investigated for fitness to practice medicine; in April 2016 he reported that the number of investigations by the GMC should be reduced in favour of local resolution and that investigations should be 'paused' if the root cause is a health problem requiring treatment.