Psychiatrist in the Chair The Official Biography of Anthony Clare

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When Savile had found his professional feet and began to exploit his powerful instinct for making money, he lavished attention on his mother. After she was widowed, he looked after her in his Scarborough flat for 16 years before her death in 1973. She was a flinty, unsentimental character, but he always called her the Duchess and treated her with a respect that verged on superstitious awe. After she died, he kept her clothes hanging in a wardrobe, and had them cleaned once a year. Dr Anthony Clare, the Radio 4 psychiatrist, suspected that Savile's emotionally starved childhood had left psychological scars that fuelled his public flamboyance and urge to do good works, but Savile was always contemptuous of any attempts to probe into his psychological make-up. "If an eminent psychiatrist told me I did all this because I was compensating for something, then I wouldn't be bothered. I don't care about the reason, I just want to get things done," he said. It was Clare who persuaded me that psychiatry was worthwhile after all. On the surface it was an exposition of the arguments that were convulsing the intellectual community - but underneath it was a firm statement that psychiatry was not quite so damned as Laing and [Thomas] Szasz would have us believe. And it was a damn good read. 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.

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”. 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. His two chapters on "schizophrenia" are still worth reading now for anyone trying to understand what it is and how it comes about. In an admirable spirit of open inquiry, Clare sympathetically presented views on the matter that he disagreed with. His own view, which still holds true, is thatCultivate a passion. If ligging on billionaires' yachts in the Med is your kind of thing, do it wholeheartedly.

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.” 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. 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. Ultimate freedom is the big challenge, now I’ve got it, and I can tell you there’s not many of us that have got ultimate freedom. I’ve got some considerable clout as well, all over. That is where the battle, the personal battle starts now.”Prescribing happiness is fraught with difficulties, because what makes one person happy may make another unhappy. My very good friend President Bashar al-Assad recently told me that using chemical weapons against his own people made him very happy. My very good friends, the Syrian people, said that chemical weapons didn't make them feel very happy. I have some experience of this in my personal life. Losing my seat at Westminster was the worst day of my life. Most other people I speak to say it was one of the best of theirs. 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. That said, I have done the research and seen the evidence and I accept that my instinct is wrong and that this rule is right.

In a Radio Times interview on the eve of the first episode of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair in 1982, Clare spoke about the curious position occupied by the profession of psychiatry in the United Kingdom compared with the United States, and he hoped that his series would make the science behind psychiatry more accessible.

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He talks about this unconstrained freedom that he had, it makes you wonder that if there were boundaries, either internal or external that they would have halted this offending behaviour and abuse. It highlights the importance of having boundaries.”

Although the programme was sometimes accused of prying, Clare countered that "no one has ever complained about being abused on it". His interviewees were well aware of what was in store, he said. "The word psychiatric tells you that what will be talked about will be things like feelings, regrets, memories, emotions, drives. It helps to shift the talk away from all that usual showbiz stuff." The challenge for a school is to find each child some kind of passion – something that will see them through the troughs. 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.Despite his high public profile, Clare was a private man, who listed his interests as golf, tennis, opera, cinema and family life. He married Jane Hogan in 1966, when he was 24. She and their three sons and four daughters survive him. 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 1960s I can go skint in a day. I can be finished like that. If a scandal comes up or something like that or the people go off you, you’re finished. I’d much rather go skint with a brand new Rolls Royce in the garage than one that’s eight years old that I love, because I’ll get more for it. 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."