Destigmatising mental illness?

David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999): Seeing through a celebrity psychiatrist

“…As Vicky Long notes, Stafford-Clark’s activities were informed by a fundamental model of public deficit (c.f. Hilgartner, 1990): ‘If mental illness was stigmatised then, in Stafford-Clark’s eyes, the fault lay with an ignorant public’ (Long, 2014: 38). This was part of a general pattern whereby ‘psychiatrists focused on raising the status of their profession and tended to treat the public as an apathetic and homogeneous mass.…”

“…This was part of a general pattern whereby ‘psychiatrists focused on raising the status of their profession and tended to treat the public as an apathetic and homogeneous mass. Ignorant, resistant to the careful efforts of psychiatrists to educate them and yet strangely prone to sensationalist reporting, the public as envisaged by psychiatrists were not capable of participating in a debate about the care of the mentally ill’ (Long, 2014: 50).…”

“…This requirement had been clearly established by precursors such as Charles Hill, the anonymous wartime ‘Radio Doctor’, whose ‘conservatism, medical and political protected his privileged position in broadcasting’ (Karpf, 1988: 47). The BBC’s deference to medical orthodoxy continued even as it began to plan for broadcasting on the apparently more contentious area of mental healthcare, a programming initiative motivated, as Long explains, by ‘the convergence of several factors: the desire of medical bodies to secure favourable publicity; an expansion of BBC programming on health issues; and recent developments in mental healthcare’ (Long, 2014: 198) – the latter including new somatic methods and the increasing incorporation of psychiatry in general medicine under the NHS (Long, 2014: 198). Although the BBC had received ‘a flood of applications from ex-patients wishing to broadcast their views’ (Long, 2014: 198), the patient voice was firmly subordinated in the four-part 1956 series, The Hurt Mind , ‘the first television show broadcast in Britain devoted to mental illness’ (Long, 2014: 194).…”

“…Psychiatrists – rather than patients, or even other healthcare professionals – were the primary source of expertise for the programme. Moreover, the chosen expert consultant was none other than William Sargant, ‘a keen advocate of the new physical therapies’ and, at the time, ‘Registrar of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association’, the precursor to the Royal College of Psychiatrists (Long, 2014: 203). Although Sargant remained off-screen, the series undoubtedly bore the impress of his somatic approach.…”

“…From 1957–1962, Stafford-Clark presented almost 60 episodes of the BBC TV programme Lifeline , at a time when audience figures for the UK’s two TV channels (BBC and ITV) could easily run into millions. Laing’s trajectory as a celebrity – his widely discussed rise and fall in public consciousness, his diminishing intellectual credibility, and his failure as a creative (rather than discursive) writer – therefore invites questions that can be answered by a detailed analysis of his precursor, Stafford-Clark, who is, unlike Laing, generally forgotten, and academically neglected (excluding Miller, 2015: 79–83; Wells, 1995: 64, 190–191; Long, 2014: 37–38; Jones, 2006: passim). Laing’s first British TV appearances in 1963–1964 (Laing, 2006: 81–84) occurred just as Stafford-Clark was being sidelined by the BBC, the British state-funded broadcaster that had propelled him onto the national stage and into the homes of viewers and listeners.…”