Cultivate a passion. If ligging on billionaires' yachts in the Med is your kind of thing, do it wholeheartedly. Patricia Casey writes: I first met Anthony in 1981, when I was a psychiatric researcher in Nottingham. He came to give a lecture, and my abiding memory was of a complex and erudite talk delivered without notes or slides. He invited me to visit his research department, and that began a long professional and collegial relationship with him. 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. 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.

Change is important. People who are fearful of change are rarely happy. We don’t mean massive change, necessarily, but enough change to keep your life stimulated. There are some gaps here. Clare had little time for psychoanalysis, or for Freud, but what did he think about Jung? And why was he so dismissive of psychotherapy, which, when practised by those who are properly accredited and supervised, has helped so many people? Maybe this is the difficulty of the posthumous biography. We can’t ask him. Be a leaf on a tree. As my very good friend Mahatma Gandhi told me over dinner last week: "The only time not to be a leaf on a tree is if you're on a tree that's about to be cut down."Seeking happiness in transient highs is a recipe for unhappiness, as my very good friend Delia Smith once pointed out to me. But it was only when I sat down with my very good friend Dr Anthony Clare, the eminent popular radio psychiatrist, that I truly understood what this meant. "The ting is this, Goyles," he said, in his lilting Irish brogue that I can still hear as clearly today as I did 10 years ago. "All you really need to remember is that there is no higher form of love than being in love with the sound of your own voice." I've never forgotten that. Clare's fame was thus consolidated, and in 1983 he was appointed professor and 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 department well and have a high public profile with a parallel career as a writer and broadcaster. He said that journalism had made him a better psychiatrist. In Africa, we say that a person is a person through other persons. That’s why God gave Adam that delectable creature, Eve.’ Think of the Garden of Eden and be a leaf on a tree. 

The format of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair was that Clare would interview guests in considerable depth and without haste, in an effort to explore their childhoods, self-image and current motivations. He first dabbled with show business while still at school, earning five shillings a week as drummer to a female pianist at the Leeds Mecca. During the second world war, he hoped to join the RAF, but instead found himself sent down the coalmines under the Emergency Powers Act – a Bevin boy.

Break the mirror: stop looking at yourself. Stop thinking about yourself – have done withnarcissism and self-regard – avoid introspection. Assess exactly how you spend your time and how it makes you feel. Audit your happiness and then, if you fancy living longer, do what you can actively to increase the happiness quotient in your life. He once said that his fascination with the successful was driven by a desire to know how they "survive things that would break some of my patients" and concluded that "when all is lost, they have a talent. They would sacrifice almost everything for a talent." 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. In the course of talking to Clare, Bob Monkhouse dissolved in tears after admitting that his mother had not spoken to him for 20 years; Paddy Ashdown wept when talking about the death of his father; Esther Rantzen admitted to him that she has always been insecure about her appearance; and Cecil Parkinson lamented the unhappiness he had caused others.

Yes, a leaf off a tree is still unique and it has the advantage that it floats about a bit — it feels free — but it’s disconnected and it dies. One of his best pieces of advice he gives to everybody is talk about everything else, don’t talk about yourself, nobody’s interested in you.’ The challenge for life is to find something that you enjoy doing, something that will sustain you, distract you, and delight you, when all else fails. However, the performance for which he is best known is In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, and to it he brought all he knew about the arts and philosophy and psychiatry and people.The challenge for a school is to find each child some kind of passion – something that will see them through the troughs. The programme started in 1982, when Clare felt that the time had come for a new series, on the basis that the public was now more knowledgeable about psychology, relationships, emotions and human behaviour. Greater openness about people’s inner lives meant that – in effect – the unconscious had shrunk since the time of Freud. They claim it was his ‘single greatest contribution to psychiatry’ and it became an instant classic. In it, Clare argued that it was unhelpful to conceptualise normality and madness as dichotomous, and better to see them as points on a continuum. Over four decades later, the authors declare that it still merits and rewards close reading. And so to In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, which ran on BBC Radio 4 from 1982 to 2001.

In a way one can see his offending now as a way of enforcing his power, it’s essentially an act of power, abusing power. 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. Bad things do happen. There is no getting away from that. Sometimes my very good friend Paul Merton gets more laughs than me on Just a Minute. But we have to learn to cope with disappointment and move on if we are to find inner happiness. To do that we have to learn these seven simple rules that were handed down to me by my very good friend Tony Blair. I once asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘Will there be people in Heaven?’ He opened his eyes wide, looked directly at me and smiled happily. ‘Oh, yes. Heaven is community. A solitary human being is a contradiction. A few years ago, I challenged the eminent psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare to conjure up the secrets of happiness; we treated the exercise as a game. Our conclusions form the basis of my new book.Elfin and nimble, Clare had seemingly boundless energy. Professor Peter White, of the Royal London Hospital, said: "I once heard Tony Clare give a keynote lecture in Sydney three hours after he had flown in from London. The airline had lost his slides and notes and jet lag had set in. Yet his audience were spellbound by a speech in which he used his Irish charm, humour and passion to remind us that so long as we truly listened and put the patient first, all would be well in psychiatry." Among Clare's other books were Depression and How to Survive It (1993, co-written with the comedian Spike Milligan), and On Men: masculinity in crisis (2000). He said about men that "there's nothing more irresponsible than the untethered man". He regarded his own parenting skills as "good enough", but said that his "family had to put up with quite a lot". He spent years working hard to gain his professional credentials and said that he consoled himself, when he looked at his eldest children, that they had survived "despite" him rather than because of him.