Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 18 November

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People (Births)

  • 1924 – Anna Elisabeth (Lise) Østergaard, Danish psychologist and politician (d. 1996).

Lise Ostergaard

Anna Elisabeth “Lise” Østergaard (18 November 1924 to 19 March 1996) was a Danish psychologist and a politician in the social-democratic party.

Under Anker Jørgensen’s leadership, she was Minister without Portfolio (1977-1980) and Minister of Culture (February 1980 to September 1982). As a psychologist, she was head of psychology in Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet (1958) as well as the first woman to become professor of clinical psychology at Copenhagen University (1963), a position she resumed after her political career ended in the mid-1980s.

Biography

Born on 18 November 1924 in Odense, Østergarrd was the daughter of Alfred Østergaard (1890-1962) and his wife Martha Kirstine Nielsen (1885–1944). She spent her first 12 years in Odense before moving with her parents to Gentofte. Although she encountered difficulties at school, she finally embarked on psychology studies at Copenhagen University. On leaving home against her father’s wishes, she paid her own way by working as a doctor’s secretary.

Psychology

After graduating in 1947, Østergaard worked as a psychologist in Norrtulls sjukhus, a children’s hospital in Stockholm. In 1949, she returned to Denmark, first spending a year in Dronning Louises Børnehospital (Queen Louise’s Children’s Hospital) before moving to the newly established children’s psychology clinic at Copenhagen University where she remained until 1954. She then entered the Rigshospitalet’s psychology department where she was appointed head psychologist in 1958, expanding her experience in clinical psychology. As a result, from 1955 to 1960 she headed a course in clinical psychology for the Dansk Psychologforening (Danish Psychologists Association) while teaching as the first woman psychologist at the university. She also took up assignments as a guest lecturer in Lund, Sweden, and Bergen, Norway.

Published in 1961, her Den psykologiske testmetode og dens relation til klinisk psykiatri (The Psychological Test Method and its Relationship to Clinical Psychiatry) raised considerable interest among psychiatrists. While working at Rigshospitalet, Østergaard treated a number of schizophrenic patients. In 1962, this led to her En psykologisk analyse af de formelle schizofrene tankeforstyrrelser (A Psychological Analysis of Formal Schizophrenic Thought Disorders), paving the way for research on the borderline between psychology and psychiatry in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States.

In 1963, Østergaard became the first female professor of psychology at Copenhagen University. After heading the Studenterrådgivningsklinikken (Student Advisory Clinic, 1964-1968), she established the Institut for Klinisk Psykologi (Clinical Psychology Institute) in 1968. From 1970 to 1973, she was a member of Denmark’s Unesco committee and from 1973 a member of Akademiet for de Tekniske Videnskaber (The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences).

On This Day … 17 November

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People (Births)

  • 1896 – Lev Vygotsky, Belarusian-Russian psychologist and philosopher (d. 1934).

People (Deaths)

  • 2014 – Patrick Suppes, American psychologist and philosopher (b. 1922).

Lev Vygotsky

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (17 November 1896 to 11 June 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on psychological development in children. He published on a diverse range of subjects, and from multiple views as his perspective changed over the years. Among his students was Alexander Luria and Kharkiv school of psychology.

He is known for his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD): the distance between what a student (apprentice, new employee, etc.) can do on their own, and what they can accomplish with the support of someone more knowledgeable about the activity. Vygotsky saw the ZPD as a measure of skills that are in the process of maturing, as supplement to measures of development that only look at a learner’s independent ability.

Also influential are his works on the relationship between language and thought, the development of language, and a general theory of development through actions and relationships in a socio-cultural environment.

Vygotsky is the subject of great scholarly dispute. There is a group of scholars who see parts of Vygotsky’s current legacy as distortions and who are going back to Vygotsky’s manuscripts in an attempt to make Vygotsky’s legacy more true to his actual ideas.

Patrick Suppes

Patrick Colonel Suppes (17 March 1922 to 17 November 2014) was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Programme for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.

On This Day … 16 November

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People (Births)

  • 1944 – Oliver Braddick, English psychologist and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1950 – Bob Smith, American physician and surgeon, co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous (b. 1879).

Oliver Braddick

Oliver John Braddick, FBA, FMedSci (born 16 November 1944) is a British developmental psychologist who is involved in research on infant visual perception. He frequently collaborates with his wife Janette Atkinson.

Braddick is Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology and was formerly head of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University from 2001 until his retirement in 2011. He attained a BA (1965) and PhD (1968) in Experimental Psychology at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1968 and 1969 he was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Lorrin Riggs, Brown University, US. In 1969 he returned to Cambridge as a University Demonstrator, proceeding to become a lecturer and then reader. By 1976, Braddick was an active member of the Cambridge Visual Development Unit, along with Janette Atkinson, his wife. The unit carried out pioneering research on the development of visual cortical function in infancy and in early visual screening. He also progressed understanding in binocular processes of both infants and adults. In 1993 Braddick moved to University College London, together with Janette Atkinson, as professors of Psychology. He proceeded to become head of the Psychology department in 1998. He was elected fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001 and that same year appointed Head Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford and fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. In July 2012, it was announced that he had been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, due to his contributions in the field of visual perception and its development in early childhood. Braddick is also a member of the Visual Development Unit at the University College of London and University of Oxford, a unit that specialises in child visual perception. He is a member of the editorial board for Current Biology.

Bob Smith

Robert Holbrook Smith (08 August 1879 to 16 November 1950), also known as Dr. Bob, was an American physician and surgeon who founded Alcoholics Anonymous with Bill Wilson (more commonly known as Bill W.).

Smith began drinking at college attending Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Early on he noticed that he could recover from drinking bouts quicker and easier than his classmates and that he never had headaches, which caused him to believe he was an alcoholic from the time he began drinking. Smith was a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity at Dartmouth. After graduation in 1902, he worked for three years selling hardware in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal and continued drinking heavily. He then returned to school to study medicine at the University of Michigan. By this time drinking had begun to affect him to the point where he began missing classes. His drinking caused him to leave school, but he returned and passed his examinations for his sophomore year. He transferred to Rush Medical College, but his alcoholism worsened to the point that his father was summoned to try to halt his downward trajectory. But his drinking increased and after a dismal showing during final examinations, the university required that he remain for two extra quarters and remain sober during that time as a condition of graduating.

After graduation, Smith became a hospital intern, and for two years he was able to stay busy enough to refrain from heavy drinking. He married Anne Robinson Ripley on 25 January 1915, and opened up his own office in Akron, Ohio, specialising in colorectal surgery and returned to heavy drinking. Recognising his problem, he checked himself into more than a dozen hospitals and sanitariums in an effort to stop his drinking. He was encouraged by the passage of Prohibition in 1919, but soon discovered that the exemption for medicinal alcohol, and bootleggers, could supply more than enough to continue his excessive drinking. For the next 17 years his life revolved around how to subvert his wife’s efforts to stop his drinking and obtain the alcohol he craved while trying to hold together a medical practice in order to support his family and his drinking.

In January 1933, Bob Smith attended a lecture by Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group. For the next two years he and Smith attended local meetings of the group in an effort to solve his alcoholism, but recovery eluded him until he met Bill Wilson on 12 May 1935. Wilson was an alcoholic who had learned how to stay sober, thus far only for some limited amounts of time, through the Oxford Group in New York, and was close to discovering long-term sobriety by helping other alcoholics. Wilson was in Akron on business that had proven unsuccessful and he was in fear of relapsing. Recognising the danger, he made inquiries about any local alcoholics he could talk to and was referred to Smith by Henrietta Seiberling, one of the leaders of the Akron Oxford Group. After talking to Wilson, Smith stopped drinking and invited Wilson to stay at his home. He relapsed almost a month later while attending a professional convention in Atlantic City. Returning to Akron on 09 June, he was given a few drinks by Wilson to avoid delirium tremens. He drank one beer the next morning to settle his nerves so he could perform an operation, which proved to be the last alcoholic drink he would ever have. The date, 10 June 1935, is celebrated as the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Smith was called the “Prince of Twelfth Steppers” by Wilson because he helped more than 5,000 alcoholics before his death. He was able to stay sober from 10 June 1935, until his death in 1950 from colon cancer. He is buried at the Mount Peace Cemetery in Akron, Ohio.

Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international fellowship requiring no membership dues or fees dedicated to helping alcoholics peer to peer in sobriety through its spiritually inclined Twelve Steps programme. Structurally guided by its Twelve Traditions, AA is non-professional, non-denominational, self-supporting and apolitical, an avowed desire to stop drinking is its sole requirement for membership. It has not endorsed the disease model of alcoholism, to which its programme is nonetheless sympathetic, but its wider acceptance is partly due to many AA members independently promulgating it. As of 2020, having spread to diverse cultures, including geopolitical areas normally resistant to grassroots movements, AA has had an estimated worldwide membership of over two million with 75% of those in the US and Canada.

On This Day … 15 November

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People (Deaths)

  • 1917 – Émile Durkheim, French sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher (b. 1858).

Emile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim (15 April 1858 to 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline of sociology and, with Max Weber, and Karl Marx, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.

From his lifetime, much of Durkheim’s work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim asserted that sociology is unique from other disciplines, such as psychology, because of its larger scale. Some tools that could be used in sociology are polls, surveys, statistics, and observing historical patients. Durkheim used these scientific tools in his analysis of suicides in Catholic and Protestant groups. His work was the concept of modern sociology. His first major sociological work was De la division du travail social (1893; The Division of Labour in Society), followed in 1895 by Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method), the same year in which Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology and become France’s first professor of sociology. Durkheim’s seminal monograph, Le Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, especially pioneered modern social research, serving to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The following year, in 1898, he established the journal L’Année Sociologique. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of institutions, understanding the term in its broader meaning as the “beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity,” with its aim being to discover structural social facts. As such, Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic, in that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as “collective consciousness” have since entered the popular lexicon.

On This Day … 14 November

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People (Deaths)

  • 2008 – Robert E. Valett, American psychologist, teacher, and author (b. 1927).

Robert E. Valett

Robert E. Valett (22 November 1927 to 14 November 2008) was an American psychology professor who wrote more than 20 books primarily focused on educational psychology.

He earned the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association and was a president of the California Association of School Psychologists.

Edcuation

Valett attended Clinton High School while also achieving the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. During World War 2, he served in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps. He then did his undergraduate work at the University of Iowa and George Williams College. Valett went on to earn an MA from the University of Chicago (1951) and an (Ed.D.) in educational psychology from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Career

Valett was a professor of psychology at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Ca., and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and taught psychology from 1970 to 1992 at California State University, Fresno where he was named Professor Emeritus. He authored several books on learning disabilities, child development, dyslexia and attention disorders/hyperactivity. He received the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association in 1982 and served as president of the California Association of School Psychologists from 1971 to 1972.

On This Day … 12 November

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People (Births)

  • 1894 – Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, Norwegian zoologist and comparative psychologist (d. 1976).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Daniel Stern, American psychologist and theorist (b. 1934).

Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe

Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe (12 November 1894 to 08 June 1976) was a Norwegian zoologist and comparative psychologist.

Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe described the pecking order of hens in his PhD dissertation of 1921. The work in his dissertation was partly based on his observations of his own chickens that he had recorded since the age of 10. The dominance hierarchy of chickens and other birds that he studied led him to the observation that these birds had established the order in which individuals would be allowed to get to food while others would have to wait for their turn.

Daniel Stern

Daniel N. Stern (16 August 1934 to 12 November 2012) was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books – most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).

He went to Harvard University as an undergraduate, from 1952 to 1956. He then attended Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completing his M.D. in 1960.

He continued his educational career doing research at the NIH in psychopharmacology from 1962 to 1964. In 1964, Stern decided to specialise in psychiatric care, completing his residency at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1972 he started a psychoanalytic education at Columbia University Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

For more than 30 years, he worked in research and practice as well in developmental psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

In his research, he dedicated his time to the observation of infants and to clinical reconstruction of early experiences. His efforts continue to contribute to currently existing developmental theories.

He was well known as an expert researcher of early affective mother-child bonding. Research and discoveries on the field of affective bonding was one of his leading activities.

Stern’s 1985 and 1995 research and conceptualisation created a bridge between psychoanalysis and research-based developmental models.

Before his death, Stern was an honorary professor in Psychology at the University of Geneva, adjunct professor in the department of Psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical School and a lecturer at the Columbia University Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

On This Day … 11 November

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People (Births)

  • 1743 – Carl Peter Thunberg, Swedish botanist, entomologist, and psychologist (d. 1828).
  • 1891 – Grunya Sukhareva, Ukrainian-Russian psychiatrist and university lecturer (d. 1981).

People (Deaths)

  • 2002 – Frances Ames, South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist (b. 1920).

Carl Peter Thunberg

Carl Peter Thunberg, also known as Karl Peter von Thunberg, Carl Pehr Thunberg, or Carl Per Thunberg (11 November 1743 to 08 August 1828), was a Swedish naturalist and an “apostle” of Carl Linnaeus.

After studying under Linnaeus at Uppsala University, he spent seven years travelling in southern Africa and Asia, collecting and describing many plants and animals new to European science, and observing local cultures. He has been called “the father of South African botany”, “pioneer of Occidental Medicine in Japan”, and the “Japanese Linnaeus”.

Grunya Sukhareva

Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva (11 November 1891 to 26 April 1981) was a Soviet child psychiatrist.

She was the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. The original paper was in Russian and published in German a year later. Sula Wolff translated it in 1996 for the English-speaking world.

She initially used the term “schizoid psychopathy”, “schizoid” meaning “eccentric” at the time, but later replaced it with “autistic (pathological avoidant) psychopathy” to describe the clinical picture of autism. The article was created almost two decades before the case reports of Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner, which were published while Sukhareva’s pioneering work remained unnoticed. This is possibly because of various political and language barriers at the time. Her name was transliterated as “Ssucharewa” when her papers appeared in Germany, and the autism researcher Hans Asperger likely chose not to cite her work, due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party and her Jewish heritage.

Frances Ames

Frances Rix Ames (20 April 1920 to 11 November 2002) was a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist, best known for leading the medical ethics inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died from medical neglect after being tortured in police custody.

When the South African Medical and Dental Council (SAMDC) declined to discipline the chief district surgeon and his assistant who treated Biko, Ames and a group of five academics and physicians raised funds and fought an eight-year legal battle against the medical establishment. Ames risked her personal safety and academic career in her pursuit of justice, taking the dispute to the South African Supreme Court, where she eventually won the case in 1985.

Born in Pretoria and raised in poverty in Cape Town, Ames became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Cape Town in 1964. Ames studied the effects of cannabis on the brain and published several articles on the subject. Seeing the therapeutic benefits of cannabis on patients in her own hospital, she became an early proponent of legalisation for medicinal use. She headed the neurology department at Groote Schuur Hospital before retiring in 1985, but continued to lecture at Valkenberg and Alexandra Hospital. After apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Ames testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about her work on the “Biko doctors” medical ethics inquiry. In 1999, Nelson Mandela awarded Ames the Star of South Africa, the country’s highest civilian award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights.

On This Day … 09 November

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 2002 – William Schutz, American psychologist and academic (b. 1925).

Paul Cameron

Paul Drummond Cameron (born 09 November 1939) is an American psychologist.

Cameron has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as an anti-gay extremist. While employed at various institutions, including the University of Nebraska, he conducted research on passive smoking, but he is best known today for his claims about homosexuality. After a successful 1982 campaign against a gay rights proposal in Lincoln, Nebraska, he established the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS), now known as the Family Research Institute (FRI). As FRI’s chairman, Cameron has written contentious papers asserting associations between homosexuality and the perpetration of child sexual abuse and reduced life expectancy. These have been heavily criticised by others in the field.

In 1983, the American Psychological Association expelled Cameron for non-cooperation with an ethics investigation. Position statements issued by the American Sociological Association, Canadian Psychological Association, and the Nebraska Psychological Association accuse Cameron of misrepresenting social science research.

William Schultz

William Schutz (19 December 1925 to 09 November 2002) was an American psychologist.

Schutz was born in Chicago, Illinois. He practiced at the Esalen Institute in the 1960s. He later became the president of BConWSA International. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA. In the 1950s, he was part of the peer-group at the University of Chicago’s Counselling Centre that included Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Elias Porter. He taught at Tufts University, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and was chairman of the holistic studies department at Antioch University until 1983.

In 1958, Schutz introduced a theory of interpersonal relations he called Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO). According to the theory three dimensions of interpersonal relations were deemed to be necessary and sufficient to explain most human interaction: Inclusion, Control and Affection. These dimensions have been used to assess group dynamics.

Schutz also created FIRO-B, a measurement instrument with scales that assess the behavioural aspects of the three dimensions. His advancement of FIRO Theory beyond the FIRO-B tool was most obvious in the change of the “Affection” scale to the “Openness” scale in the “FIRO Element-B”. This change highlighted his newer theory that behaviour comes from feelings (“FIRO Element-F”) and the self-concept (“FIRO Element-S”). “Underlying the behaviour of openness is the feeling of being likable or unlikeable, lovable or unlovable. I find you likable if I like myself in your presence, if you create an atmosphere within which I like myself.”

W. Schutz authored more than ten books and many articles. His work was influenced by Alexander Lowen, Ida Pauline Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais. As a body therapist he led encounter group workshops focussing on the underlying causes of illnesses and developing alternative body-centred cures. His books, “Profound Simplicity” and “The Truth Option,” address this theme. He brought new approaches to body therapy that integrated truth, choice (freedom), (self) responsibility, self-esteem, self-regard and honesty into his approach.

In his books one encounters the concept of energy cycles (e.g. Schutz 1979) which a person goes through or call for completion. The single steps of the energy cycles are: motivation – prepare – act – feel.

Schutz died at his home in Muir Beach, California in 2002.

On This Day … 08 November

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 2007 – Chad Varah, English priest, founded The Samaritans (b. 1911).

Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach (08 November 1884 to 02 April 1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. His method has come to be referred to as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders. Rorschach continued to refine the test until his premature death at age 37.

Education and Career

Rorschach, in his early years, attended Schaffhausen Cantonal School in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Rorschach was a bright student from the beginning, and he often tutored other students at his school. After Ernst Haeckel suggested a career in science, Rorschach attended Academie de Neuchatel in 1904 studying geology and botany. After just a single term, he transferred to the Universite de Dijon to take French classes. The same year he enrolled in medical school at the University of Zurich. While studying, Rorschach began learning Russian, and in 1906, while studying in Berlin, he travelled to Russia for a holiday.

Travel was a large part of his life after medical school. On a trip to Dijon, in France, he met a man who taught him about Russian culture. Torn by the decision whether to stay in Switzerland or move to Russia, he eventually took a job as first assistant at a Cantonal Mental Hospital. While working at the hospital, Rorschach finished his doctoral dissertation in 1912 under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had taught Carl Jung. The excitement in intellectual circles over psychoanalysis constantly reminded Rorschach of his childhood inkblots. Wondering why different people often saw entirely different things in the same inkblots, he began, while still a medical student, showing inkblots to schoolchildren and analysing their responses. This dissertation contained the origins for his ink blot experiment.

All the while, Rorschach remained fascinated by Russian culture. In 1913, he obtained a fellowship opportunity in Russia, where he continued to study contemporary psychiatric methods. Rorschach spent some time in the village of Kryukovo outside of Moscow, and in 1914 he returned to Switzerland to work at the Waldau University Hospital in Bern. In 1915, Rorschach took the position of assistant director at the regional psychiatric hospital at Herisau, and in 1921 he wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test.

Chad Varah

Edward Chad Varah CH CBE (12 November 1911 to 08 November 2007) was a British Anglican priest and social activist from England. In 1953, he founded the Samaritans, the world’s first crisis hotline, to provide telephone support to those contemplating suicide.

Life

Varah was born in the town of Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, the eldest of nine children of the vicar at the Anglican church of St Peter. His father, Canon William Edward Varah, a strict Tractarian, named him after St Chad, who, according to Bede, had founded the 7th-century monastery ad Bearum (“at Barrow”), which may have occupied an Anglo-Saxon enclosure next to Barton Vicarage.

He was educated at Worksop College in north Nottinghamshire and won an exhibition to study natural sciences at Keble College, Oxford, quickly switching to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He was involved in the university Russian and Slavonic clubs and was founder-president of the Scandinavian Club. He graduated with a third-class degree in 1933.

Clerical Career

Varah was initially reluctant to follow his father’s vocation, but his godfather persuaded him to study at Lincoln Theological College, where he was taught by the Revd Michael Ramsey, later Archbishop of Canterbury. He was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1935 and priest in 1936. He first served as curate at St Giles, Lincoln, from 1935 to 1938, then at St Mary’s, Putney, from 1938 to 1940 and Barrow-in-Furness from 1940 to 1942. He became vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn, in 1942 and moved to St Paul, Battersea, in 1949. He was also chaplain of St John’s Hospital, Battersea.

The Grocers’ Company offered him the living of St Stephen Walbrook in 1953. He became rector of the church, designed by Christopher Wren, adjacent to the Mansion House in the City of London. The church was closed for structural repairs from 1978 to 1987. His son, Andrew, built chairs to replace its pews. Great controversy followed the installation of a large circular altar in travertine marble by Henry Moore, commissioned by Varah and his churchwarden Peter Palumbo. The matter was finally settled by the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved in 1987, which granted a retrospective faculty for its installation.

He was a supporter of women priests, but preferred the traditional 16th century Book of Common Prayer (1549) to the liturgical changes authorised in 1966 (Book of Common Prayer (1928). Despite the absence of a permanent congregation, the church remained popular for weddings. He officiated at the marriage of Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, only daughter of Princess Margaret, to actor Daniel Chatto in 1994.

He was made an honorary prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1975, becoming senior prebendary in 1997. He retired in 2003, aged 92, by which time he was the oldest incumbent in the Church of England.

Samaritans

Varah began to understand the problems facing the suicidal when he was taking a funeral as an assistant curate in 1935, his first church service, for a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life because she had begun to menstruate and feared that she had a sexually transmitted disease. He later said “Little girl, I didn’t know you, but you have changed the rest of my life for good.” He vowed at that time to encourage sex education, and to help people who were contemplating suicide and had nowhere to turn.

To that end, Chad Varah founded the Samaritans in 1953 in the crypt of his church, with the stated aim that it would be an organisation “to befriend the suicidal and despairing.” The phone line, MAN 9000 (for MANsion House), received its first call on 02 November 1953, and the number of calls increased substantially after publicity in the Daily Herald on 07 December 1953.

He was director of the central London branch of Samaritans until 1974, and president from 1974 to 1986. He was also founder chairman of Befrienders Worldwide (Samaritans International) from 1974 to 1983, and then its president from 1983 to 1986.

Break with Samaritans

Later in life, Varah became disillusioned with the Samaritans organisation. He announced in 2004 that “It’s no longer what I founded. I founded an organisation to offer help to suicidal or equally desperate people. The last elected chairman re-branded the organisation. It was no longer to be an emergency service. It was to be an emotional support.”

On This Day … 07 November

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People (Births)

  • 1929 – Eric Kandel, Austrian-American neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Nobel Prize laureate.

Eric Kandel

Eric Richard Kandel (born Erich Richard Kandel, 07 November 1929) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.

He is a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Neurobiology and Behaviour, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. He currently serves on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation. Kandel’s popularised account chronicling his life and research, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.