A nation on the couch?

Professor Anthony Clare, who has died at the age of 64, is widely hailed as bringing psychiatry to the people with his insightful yet compassionate interviews of the great and the good.

Many of the celebrities who appeared on Professor Clare's shows were reduced to tears during delicate probing, confessing to family breakdown or detailing the pain of bereavement.

For those who bemoan what they see as society's increasing propensity to whinge, Professor Clare was one of the architects of our modern nation of navel gazers.

For others, he helped create a society much more understanding of the frailty of the human condition.

"He brought psychiatry out of the hospital and showed that even those living such apparently happy and successful lives had problems too," says psychology writer and broadcaster, Professor Adrian Fulham.

"He made it acceptable to seek help, and whether one feels the pendulum has swung to far the other way or not, his legacy must be seen as a positive one."

Telling the nation

Counselling was almost unheard of in Britain until about the 1950s, and its arrival is largely down to the arrival of a German refugee - Hans Hoxter.

He was convinced of the value of discussing experiences by people who had seen and suffered war, and was bewildered to find it was almost entirely absent in Britain. He set out to correct this, founding a key organisation in 1951.

"Empire and war did demand a stiff upper lip approach. But you look back to our medieval selves, we farted, we belched, we cried, we let it go. In a sense we are simply returning to that after a blip"
Philip Hodson
BACP

Psychiatrist Anthony Clare dies

At the same time broadcasters were also cottoning onto the idea of exploring problems on air.

John Freeman's Face-to-Face aired live on the BBC between 1959 and 1962. It pioneered a new style of interviewing, with the camera focused almost solely on the subject, who was subjected to incisive questioning.

The well-known broadcaster of the day Gilbert Harding wept when talking about his mother, while the interview with comedian Tony Hancock was so disturbing the corporation wondered whether it should be aired at all.

"So Anthony wasn't the first," says Philip Hodson of The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

"But he had something about him that caught the nation. He was a doctor, he had authority. And he was in the right place at the right time."

Let it all out

Mr Hodson believes in any event the penchant for exploring our problems is a "natural" reversion to our former selves.

"Empire and war did demand a stiff upper lip approach. But you look back to our medieval selves, we farted, we belched, we cried, we let it go. In a sense we are simply returning to that after a blip."

But after the explosion of counselling in the 1990s and the boom in the self-help market, a critical eye has once again be turned to on the value of focusing so intently on one's problems, even if many have managed to carve a successful career out of it.

In the aftermath of the 11 September terror attacks, there were famously three therapists for every one person dead, but even as long ago as the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989, the bereaved were inundated with offers of counselling.

A recent study at Columbia University in New York examined whether the army of counsellors helped those who lived through the destruction of the twin towers, and concluded they did not.

"There is little evidence that getting people to 'open up' actually helps them," said the report's author.

"And more data supporting the view that talking about how unhappy you are just makes it worse."