Psychiatrist in the Chair: making a connection with Anthony Clare
Psychiatrist in the Chair The Official Biography of Anthony Clare
- Psychiatrist in the Chair: The Official Biography of Anthony Clare
- Brendan Kelly & Muiris Houston
- Merrion Press, €22.95
Professor Anthony Clare is probably best known for his probing interviews bordering on therapy sessions that spanned two decades on BBC Radio 4. As the host of In The Psychiatrist’s Chair, Clare revealed new sides to an eclectic list of guests, from Uri Geller and Maya Angelou, to RD Laing and Spike Milligan. In this official biography, Brendan Kelly and Muiris Houston shift the focus to Clare himself, who, despite being a public figure for decades, evaded the personal scrutiny he exacted on his many interviewees.
As a broadcaster and writer, Clare’s impact on the public’s relationship with mental health cannot be understated, and as a psychiatrist, his influence on the hospital environment for patients and staff was crucial. Psychiatrist in the Chair presents a detailed profile of a complicated man and the toll his extraordinary achievements took on his personal relationships.
Anthony Clare was born in Dublin on Christmas Eve of 1942 into a comfortable middle class home headed by Clare’s father, Bernard, a state solicitor in the Land Registry. To fully understand the scope of Clare’s professional achievements in adulthood, an exacting look at his early years is necessary. Educated at Gonzaga, Clare was surrounded by other well-to-do children of well-to-do parents, and it is here that he gets “the early taste of the joys of performing in front of an appreciative audience.” From the school newspaper, competitive debating, and the staging of amateur theatre, Gonzaga, and primarily Fr Joe Veale, provide an encouraging atmosphere where anything is possible. Veale, who becomes a life-long mentor for Clare, counters the unsatisfiable and ever critical presence of Clare’s mother, Agnes. Emerging as a young adult into a vastly changed cultural atmosphere, with a post-war era of abundant new trends; from American cinema, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, to television, JFK and Radio Luxembourg, Clare’s brilliance accompanies him to UCD to study medicine.
Much of Clare’s biography is dedicated to his years as an award-winning debater and, unless fully within that milieu oneself, it is hard to understand either the draw or the significance. Clare’s time with the Literary & Historical Society (L&H) undoubtedly shaped his ability to quickly formulate convincing arguments and deliver them with authority while also surrounding him with the future who’s who of Irish politics and society. Where other young Irish people were travelling to the UK with hopes of better economic independence, the elite bubble of collegiate debating allowed Clare and his chums to travel across the pond to partake in prestigious competitions with students from UCL, Oxford and Cambridge.
“Bringing the Observer Mace home to the cheering L&H was like Caesar’s army returning in triumph to Rome. There would be few events in Clare’s later life that could match the unadulterated joy and sheer exuberance of that evening.” Detailing Clare’s early years as a psychiatrist, biographers Kelly and Houston present an interesting account of the changing environment Clare graduated into. “The late 1960s was an exciting time to enter psychiatry. For over a century, mental healthcare in Ireland had been defined by large public asylums designed in the 1800s.”
His return to Ireland in 1967 after training in Syracuse, New York coincided with the governmental Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness, which “urged radical and widespread changes”. While training at St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin under Professor Norman Moore, Clare sees the importance of a more humanistic and community-based approach to psychiatric care and he carries this outlook with him to Maudsley Hospital, London. It is impossible to understate just how much Clare accomplished over the next few years and it is a wonder, not just to the reader, but to Clare’s biographers and even his family, how he managed to achieve all that he did. This period in the 1970s is also where Professor Anthony Clare the psychiatrist becomes Professor Anthony Clare the public persona.
Clare accumulated hundreds of bylines in The Irish Times, The Spectator, The Listener, New Society, as well as many eminent medical journals, where he blended his unique deductive rapidity and his enthusiasm for communicating to bring a new side of psychiatry into the public sphere. Whether dealing directly with his patients or outlining psychotherapy in a newspaper column, Clare was adamant that people understand mental illness and the healthcare system used to treat it. With the 1976 publication of Psychiatry in Dissent, Clare announced himself as a media-savvy authority of modern psychiatry.
Clare’s most interesting period is the early 1980s where the BBC produced his in-depth interview series In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. The series not only made Clare a household name but also reinvented broadcast interviewing as a mode.
In the hour-long episodes, Clare took a magnifying glass to the lives of celebrities and politicians, presenting the person behind the name and aiming to “attack the notion that the celebrated few have their molecules arranged in a different order to ours.” Clare’s guests remember their interviews as distinctly as listeners do, and listening back now, his skills as a communicator and an empathetic psychiatrist are gripping.
Included in this biography are excerpts from transcripts of stand out interviews such as with Ann Widdecombe, Nicola Horlick, Esther Rantzen and Uri Geller. They are utterly captivating, as Clare’s inimitable skill in communicating exacts the reality behind the veneer of fame.
Reading Clare’s interview with Jimmy Savile, makes for uncomfortable and uneasy reading for the modern reader aware of the scope of Savile’s horrific sexual abuse of children which would come to light after his passing. “While Clare was clearly intrigued by Savile, he was also disturbed by him and, in the end, found Savile chilling.”
Clare’s media work acted as a sort of unofficial public campaign for awareness around mental health services and he used his clout to push for change in public policy, better conditions for patients and workers, and a more integrated community-based approach to mental treatment. He also pushed the public’s interest in candid celebrity life, something that resonates even more so decades later, where the private life of a celebrity is as interesting and entertaining to the public as what they are famous for in the first place.
The book is at times repetitive and scattered, not quite grounding itself in any clear chronology and going back over events already mentioned. However this tangled approach to biography does reflect the pace at which Clare approached his life and work, cramming as much as possible into each day. Doubtless the most revealing parts of the book are the reflections from Clare’s wife, Jane, and their seven children, who all admit to not fully knowing the man who seemed to know everything. Balanced against his extensive achievements, it is poignant to read about the personal cost of Clare’s success and how despite everything he achieved, nothing seemed to be enough.
Psychiatrist in the Chair provides an interesting perspective through which we can view not just the Irish mental health system but the relationship the Irish public has with mental health. Clare’s input and doggedness about change is undeniable and left a clear mark on the field. The insight that this biography provides into this key figure makes for essential reading now, at a time when we find ourselves reassessing what it means to connect with others and how much that connection contributes to our mental health.
