Psychiatrist in the Chair The Official Biography of Anthony Clare

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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. From the information provided by the hundreds of people who have come forward to Operation Yewtree, police and the NSPCC have concluded that Jimmy Savile was one of the UK’s most prolific known sexual predators. Indeed the formal recording of allegations of crime on this scale is, to the best of our knowledge, unprecedented in the UK.” Instinctively, I do resist change. On the whole I like things as they are. Or, better still, I like them as they were. As for his media success, the treatment of mental illness is always the forgotten child of the health service. If Clare gave it a higher profile and made it a more attractive choice for the brightest students, well, why should anybody complain? Olivia O'Leary

Next, said Dr Clare, ‘break the mirror – stop thinking about yourself’. That’s tough to do right now, when every time I cough I suddenly think ‘This could be the beginning of the end’. But it’s clearly essential. Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, observed that his least-happy patients were always the most self-absorbed, and the most happy were those most interested in other people and the world around them. Look up and out, not down and in. In a way one can see his offending now as a way of enforcing his power, it’s essentially an act of power, abusing power. Political activist Bruce Kent was interviewed in 1985 and remembers Clare as "a decent man who had done his homework . . . with a direct but non-hostile and honest approach. I was well used by then to journalists who had their own knives to grind. He got me to talk openly and frankly . . . I remember leaving the BBC that day and thinking that I had got quite a lot off my chest."His friend and neighbour Robin Murray recalls ‘he was also beginning to write odd pieces for the major newspapers which did not make him popular among many senior staff at the Maudsley. They thought who was this jumped-up little Irish bugger …..’

He also suffered some disappointment when he ran for the Seanad (Senate) in 1993 and failed to get elected. There were dark moments, but ultimately, he was looking forward to retirement when his life was cut short at the age of sixty-four. How would he react to today’s pandemic? Anthony Clare in the 1960sCaroline Richmond, Guardian obituary (includes additional section on his hosting of the After Dark television programme), 31 October 2007 To thrive, you have to be both an individual — with a sense that you are unique and that you matter — and at the same time you need to be connected to a bigger organism: a family, a community, a company, a club. You need to be part of something bigger than yourself. Stephen Fry and Prof Anthony Clare. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs via Getty Indelible impressions In turn, he gave medical students of a later generation much to think about. Professor Simon Wessely, of King's College London and the Institute of Psychiatry, said: "Anthony Clare was the reason I did psychiatry; when I was asked to write on '10 books that changed me' for the British Journal of Psychiatry, my first choice was Psychiatry in Dissent, because it inspired me to chose psychiatry as a career when I was a medical student." So what, then, is happiness? Well, as you might have gathered by now, having friends can make you very happy. I have lots of friends. The Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, President Obama and Jesus all regard themselves as intimates of mine. Sex can also make you happy: I like to have a great deal of sex. Preferably in front of a mirror with rows of my favourite teddy bears lined up to applaud me. However, my very good friend Ann Widdecombe says she is very happy not having sex. What we can agree on, though, is that anyone having sex with Ann is likely to be very unhappy.

The interview appears in a book by BBC Radio 4 psychiatrist, the late Anthony Clare, which brings together a number of interviews from the radio series In The Psychiatrists Chair.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." In a way one can see his offending now as a way of enforcing his power, it’s essentially an act of power, abusing power, rather than someone who has an unusual libido.” In the course of talking to Clare, Bob Monkhouse dissolved in tears after admitting that his mother had not spoken to him for 20 years; Paddy Ashdown wept when talking about the death of his father; Esther Rantzen admitted to him that she has always been insecure about her appearance; and Cecil Parkinson lamented the unhappiness he had caused others. In 2011, the co-author of the study, Bruno Frey, in another paper, Happy People Live Longer, reported that happy people live 14 per cent longer than unhappy people, increasing their longevity by seven-and-a-half to ten years.This finding accords precisely with the 2013 findings of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and with research begun in Oxford, Ohio, in the Seventies among the local inhabitants then aged50 and over.Forty years on, in Oxford, Ohio, who has survived in good health? Those who had a positive outlook on their life and impending old age have lived, on average, 7.6 years longer than those with negative views.

The challenge for life is to find something that you enjoy doing, something that will sustain you, distract you, and delight you, when all else fails. 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. 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. Clare's fame was thus consolidated, and in 1983 he was appointed a professor and the head of the department of psychological medicine at St Bartholomew's hospital, London. He was an inspiring head of department, and demonstrated to the sceptics that it was possible to run a good department well and have a high public profile with a prolific parallel career as a writer and broadcaster. He said journalism had made him a better psychiatrist. Clare was a great guy, a very elegant interviewer . . . It was one of the best interviews I’ve ever had, no doubt. Clare’s questions penetrated my life, my psyche, and my psychological make-up. He was bang-on.”

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His obsession with making money is questioned, with Savile revealing an odd motive for always keeping a new car in the driveway. Knowing what we now know, it seems he prepared to be ready to go on the run. Somehow, Clare created a space where even the introverted were willing to speak about their personal lives to an audience of millions on national radio.