Psychiatrist in the Chair The Official Biography of Anthony Clare

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Ivan Illich and Laing had been the psychiatric gurus of the 1960s, and Psychiatry in Dissent was, said Wessely, "a sober response to the intellectual brilliance, but also excesses, of that decade. If you ask them to enumerate the people that they feel close to and would connect and communicate with, those who name the most seem to be happiest and those who name the least are the unhappiest.

The challenge for a school is to find each child some kind of passion – something that will see them through the troughs. I can picture him clearly, but I can only remember one thing that he said to me. He said it to me so often I am not surprised it was something I could never forget. What he said was this: ‘Keep that Latin accurate.’ He said it whenever he spoke to me – without fail. Behind the professional good samaritan there was a man of ruthless willpower, intelligent enough to become a member of Mensa. It was as if the scale of his charitable efforts was an expression of his enormous desire to be seen to have achieved something. Jimmy Savile: ‘One of the UK’s most prolific known sexual predators.’ Photograph: Manchester Daily Express/SSPL/Getty The Savile interview Elfin and nimble, Clare had seemingly boundless energy. Professor Peter White of the Royal London Hospital said: "I once heard Tony Clare give a keynote lecture in Sydney three hours after he had flown in from London. The airline had lost his slides and notes and jet lag had set in. Yet his audience were spellbound by a speech in which he used his Irish charm, humour and passion to remind us that so long as we truly listened and put the patient first, all would be well in psychiatry."Clare decided on medicine as a career when he was a teenager recovering from an accident in hospital. It seemed to him to be interesting work. Later, as a doctor, he was seeing patients in general wards who were clearly distressed and depressed, and the doctors didn't know what to make of them: "This was during the 1960s of course, a time when psychiatry had become a very interesting branch of medicine. I had read RD Laing's remarkable book The Divided Self, and that was a great influence on me." In pursuing these themes over the following years, Clare was unfailingly courteous and supportive with his guests, listening for the most part, rather than interrogating.

Clare decided on medicine as a career when he was teenager recovering from an accident in hospital. It seemed to him to be interesting work. Later, as a doctor, he was seeing patients in general wards who were clearly distressed and depressed, and the doctors didn't know what to make of them: "This was during the 1960s of course, a time when psychiatry had become a very interesting branch of medicine. I had read RD Laing's remarkable book The Divided Self, and that was a great influence on me." Listen: Brendan Kelly and Muiris Houston talk Psychiatrist in the Chair on the Brendan O'Connor Show Elfin and nimble, Clare had seemingly boundless energy. Professor Peter White, of the Royal London Hospital, said: "I once heard Tony Clare give a keynote lecture in Sydney three hours after he had flown in from London. The airline had lost his slides and notes and jet lag had set in. Yet his audience were spellbound by a speech in which he used his Irish charm, humour and passion to remind us that so long as we truly listened and put the patient first, all would be well in psychiatry." Forensic psychiatrist Dr Seena Fazel, who has studied dozens of child sex abuse cases, has viewed the transcripts and told Channel 4 News that he believes Savile’s problems stem from unresolved issues from childhood and “emotional poverty”.Psychiatrist and broadcaster Anthony Clare dies". Reuters. 30 October 2007 . Retrieved 1 November 2007. This, for me, is the most challenging of the seven secrets. Instinctively, I do resist change. I am a conservative Conservative. On the whole I like things as they are. Or, better still, I like them as they were.

Now, changing your job (or the place where you live) to reduce the time you spend commuting may be a difficult if not near-impossible undertaking, but, surely, if it helps add more than seven years to your life-span, it is at least worth considering?Caroline Richmond, Guardian obituary (includes additional section on his hosting of the After Dark television programme), 31 October 2007 Clare was a persistent critic of Sigmund Freud and of psychoanalysis, though his criticisms were not new. He regarded Freud as "a religious prophet speaking in a secular language". In a 1985 two-part newspaper essay about psychoanalysis, he remarked on the fact that "patients selected for psychoanalysis are very much healthier and more socially capable than patients treated otherwise". He referred to a study that pointed out that more than half the patients in psychoanalysis in the United States were either themselves practising psychiatrists or psychologists, or were their wives, husbands or children. He said about psychoanalysis that "the overwhelming majority of reported cases involve patients suffering minor degrees of psychiatric ill-health or people who are not patients at all. This high degree of selectivity has largely been ignored by psychoanalysts and their supporters." Savile’s relationship with his mother, who he called “the duchess”, was complex, he notes she never showed tactile affection but says she raised him for the first half of his life and he raised her for the second half. He barely mentions his father. In Africa, we say that a person is a person through other persons. That’s why God gave Adam that delectable creature, Eve.’ Think of the Garden of Eden and be a leaf on a tree. 

Throughout the interview Savile refuses to open up about his feelings and goes to great pains to claim he has no skeletons in his closet: “I mean I don’t go away from here and indulge in some wild fetishes or wild weirdo things or anything like that. The research shows that people who are best protected against certain physical diseases – cancer and heart disease, for example – in addition to doing all the other things they should do, are likely to be part of a community of some kind, are likely to be socially involved. Patricia Casey writes: I first met Anthony in 1981, when I was a psychiatric researcher in Nottingham. He came to give a lecture, and my abiding memory was of a complex and erudite talk delivered without notes or slides. He invited me to visit his research department, and that began a long professional and collegial relationship with him.

Assess exactly how you spend your time and how it makes you feel. Audit your happiness and then, if you fancy living longer, do what you can actively to increase the happiness quotient in your life.  But my parents taught me something useful that I have tried to pass on to my two boys. Whatever you are doing, be aware of it and stay involved.