David Hazell Clark

David Clark was a pioneer of social therapy in psychiatry and the development of therapeutic communities in mental hospitals. He was born in London into a high-achieving family. His father, Alfred, was a member of the Somerset Quaker shoemaking family, who became professor of pharmacology at University College London and expected David, his eldest child, to follow in his footsteps. David's parents rejected religious belief but brought up their four children with a Quakerly emphasis on social justice.

At the age of 16 David visited Germany to improve his language skills. His host family were committed Nazis and arranged for him to spend two weeks in a Hitler Youth camp. He enjoyed the fellowship but was aghast at their racial theories and alarmed by preparations for war. He came home committed to the anti-fascist crusade. He began his medical training in 1937, but when the second world war broke out he was eager to finish his studies quickly so that he could join the army.

Aged 24 he was parachuted into Germany to set up field ambulances. As medical officer to a transit camp for refugees he was strongly affected by what he learned about the horrors of Belsen. After the war ended, he was sent to Sumatra, where he organised the evacuation of 2,000 Dutch civilians from a Japanese internment camp. In March 1946 he was posted to Palestine for eight months where he had his first experience of psychiatry. "It was there," he wrote, "that I began my lifelong study and practice of psychiatry." In his retirement he wrote Descent Into Conflict (1995), a book about his wartime experiences.

In 1953, soon after completing his training as a psychiatrist, he applied to be medical superintendent at Fulbourn hospital, Cambridge, in order to gain interview practice, and to his astonishment was offered the job. At 32, David became Britain's youngest medical superintendent, responsible for a depressing and oppressive mental hospital with nearly 1,000 patients. His first book, Administrative Therapy, was written in 1962 when he and his family were offered a year at Stanford University in California, where he had the opportunity to discuss his ideas with Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, and Erik Erikson, the developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst. This was followed in 1974 by Social Therapy in Psychiatry, which was translated into seven languages.

In 1967, he was appointed as a World Health Organisation adviser, visiting psychiatric services in Japan, Peru, Argentina and Poland. In 1972, David helped to found the Association of Therapeutic Communities and was its first chairman.

Source:http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/may/11/david-clark-obituary