Psychiatrist in the Chair The Official Biography of Anthony Clare

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Clare first came to public prominence on Radio 4's Stop the Week programme in the 1970s. He hosted a feature on the show in which he interviewed various high-achievers about their past; when one of his patients complained that his subjects seemed too perfect, Clare decided to delve deeper and In the Psychiatrist's Chair came about. But it is as a raiser of cash for charity that he will be remembered. His efforts won him a broad spectrum of admirers from royalty, show business and politics, and recognition in the shape of an OBE (1971), a knighthood (1990) and even a knighthood from the papacy (1982).

That’s what happened with In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, the book reveals. Sometimes more than two hours were recorded for a 40-minute programme. It meant interviewees didn’t have to be hurried along and, having hit their stride, they often revealed more than they, or anybody else, expected. So we had Spike Milligan on his depression; agony aunt Claire Rayner shedding tears over her unhappy childhood; and Bob Monkhouse breaking down after admitting that his mother had not spoken to him for 20 years. This was gripping radio: elegant, erudite, entertaining. It helped that Clare was clearly impressed by Geller and that Geller could bend keys with his mind. But the real magic came from Clare’s openness to Geller’s performance and persona, Clare’s willingness to express his bafflement at what he saw, and Clare’s endless curiosity about people – not only about people who could bend spoons with their minds, but about everyone whom Clare encountered in his media and medical careers.

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The challenge for a school is to find every child some kind of passion — something that will see them through the troughs. The programme started in 1982, when Clare felt that the time had come for a new series, on the basis that the public was now more knowledgeable about psychology, relationships, emotions and human behaviour. Greater openness about people’s inner lives meant that – in effect – the unconscious had shrunk since the time of Freud.

They claim it was his ‘single greatest contribution to psychiatry’ and it became an instant classic. In it, Clare argued that it was unhelpful to conceptualise normality and madness as dichotomous, and better to see them as points on a continuum. Over four decades later, the authors declare that it still merits and rewards close reading. And so to In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, which ran on BBC Radio 4 from 1982 to 2001. Soon after the inauguration of Radio 1 in 1967, he was recruited by the BBC; his weekly show ran for two decades from 1969. His old-fashioned showbiz style – "Now then, now then ..." – was worlds apart from his innovative fellow DJs from the pirate-radio world, and nobody could ever accuse Savile of being fired by a crusading zeal for finding and promoting revolutionary pop music. After his mother’s death he spent five days with her body before the funeral and claimed it was the happiest time of his life, when quizzed by Dr Clare Savile claims that in those days she was “all mine”. However, the performance for which he is best known is In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, and to it he brought all he knew about the arts and philosophy and psychiatry and people.

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His areas of research were practical, often exploring the relationship between psychiatry and society. He did a study showing that the rate of schizophrenia in Irish emigrants in London was no worse than in the indigenous population, thereby dispelling the myth of the mad Irish. He also published more than 100 research papers and reports over a 30-year period, on subjects ranging from fatigue syndrome and infectious mononucleosis ("glandular fever"), childhood sexual abuse and adult depression, alcoholism among in-patients, doctors' double standards on alcohol, premenstrual tension, and ethical issues in psychiatry.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Clare was the best-known psychiatrist in Britain. His first media appearances were on the light-hearted BBC Radio 4 discussion programme Stop the Week. He was also for many years the voice of the BBC popular science programme QED. Clare became famous for his probing interviews on radio and television with well-known figures such as Bob Monkhouse and Paddy Ashdown [3] in several series of In the Psychiatrist's Chair, [4] which ran from 1982. [5] Personal life and death [ edit ] Yes, a leaf off a tree is still unique and it has the advantage that it floats about a bit — it feels free — but it’s disconnected and it dies. In some unusually judgmental comments, Clare concluded that Savile was both calculating and materialistic, and Clare expressed a sense of foreboding, suggesting that there was some profound psychological disturbance in Savile, rooted in a deprived and emotionally indifferent childhood. Ann Widdecombe, when asked why she had agreed to be interviewed, said ‘she looked forward to the duel’, though one of her colleagues ‘wasn’t sure a practicing psychiatrist should be doing this for entertainment’. Others shared that view, too.The intimacy of the discussions undoubtedly heightened the emotional temperature in the small BBC studios where they were recorded. Instinctively, I do resist change. On the whole I like things as they are. Or, better still, I like them as they were. Years later, in 1996, in an introduction to an interview with Laing in the first collection of In the Psychiatrist's Chair, Clare wrote, "We are still too close to R.D. Laing's death to be able fully to assess the ultimate worth and impact of his views. His was a powerful voice in the movement to demystify mental illness and he undoubtedly contributed to the process whereby psychiatry moved out of the large, isolated, grim mental hospitals into acute units attached to general hospitals and into the community . . . He influenced a whole generation of young men and women in their choice of psychiatry as a career." Clare once attributed his own choice of career to Laing's influence. And, finally, if you want to be happy… Be Happy. Act it, play the part, put on a happy face. Start thinking diff erently. ‘Choose to be optimistic,’ says the Dalai Lama. ‘It feels better.’ Through his research and his media presence, Clare was becoming one of Britain’s best-known psychiatrists. By 1983, aged only 41, he had become professor and head of psychological medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.