Abstract
The Editorial Board met not long after Bryan died. Those of us who had worked with him on the journal began the meeting by sharing memories and offering our thanks for his inspiration and hard work in founding Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (CCPP).
Anna Brazier
I joined the board as Book Review Editor in the late 1990s. It was my first experience of ‘behind the scenes’ of a journal, and initially I was very much in awe of all the proceedings, and of Bryan. However, I soon learned that the culture on the board was one of support and learning. It was Bryan’s commitment to keeping CCPP in touch with the world of the everyday clinician that meant that my inexperience with publishing was not a barrier to having a voice in respect of the journal. This philosophy of inclusion and relevance, of keeping in mind the everyday world of busy clinicians, is one Michael and I have been keen to continue as CCPP passes its 20th birthday. We agreed at our meeting in December that our best tribute to Bryan in respect of his foresight and energy in founding CCPP would be to share our personal memories of his unique contribution. The following recollections are from Bernadette Wren, Neil Frude, Arlene Vetere and Kenn Nunn all of whom have also made huge contributions to the ongoing success of CCPP.
Bernadette Wren
When Bryan set up CCPP in 1996, his sense of what was needed in a journal for people working in the field of child and adolescent mental health emerged from his absolute immersion, at that time, in direct and complex clinical work. I first met Bryan in 1988 when I started working at the Mildred Creak psychiatric unit at Great Ormond St Hospital. He was deeply involved there in work with children with serious disorders of eating, practising within a family therapy model. He was deeply committed to client-facing work, fascinated by the immediacy of the clinical encounter and rewarded by the business of building warm and trusting relationships with children and families, at which he excelled. In particular, he integrated his well-stocked and intensely focused mind with a capacity to develop sensitive and nuanced emotional exchanges with his patients. Like many of us at the time (and still today), he believed that there was much to learn about how to make such encounters more effective and more powerful and felt frustrated that researchers typically either lacked interest and curiosity in everyday clinical work or lacked the skills and imagination to research it adequately. A dedicated journal would be a print medium in which clinicians could talk to clinicians, describing their practice, reporting innovations, posing novel clinical questions and challenging prevailing orthodoxies. CCPP was to be the go-to location for such conversations. The editorial team of the new journal would recognise that clinicians need help in their everyday endeavours as they face people in complex, recalcitrant and heart-breaking predicaments who are turning to them for wisdom, guidance and support. Typically, for Bryan, he had spent years trying to persuade internationally esteemed editors and authors of the need for such a publication – until one day he just decided to set it up himself. And so CCPP was born.
Neil Frude
I first met Bryan when I submitted some papers to the Journal of Family Therapy which he was editing at the time (this was in the early 1980s). He agreed to publish the papers and asked me to join the editorial board. It didn’t take long for me to appreciate the qualities that I would always associate with Bryan – his hard work, his open-mindedness, his fair-mindedness and his gentle encouragement to others (especially those who were new to the publishing game) to get their ideas into print.
Later, I was able to organise for a number of psychology students from my university in Cardiff to spend their ‘year out’ in Great Ormond Street Hospital working with Bryan, Rachel Bryant-Waugh and others from the young person’s anorexia unit. This was an incredible opportunity which inspired many of these students to later pursue a clinical psychology career. When I visited GOSH to monitor their progress, it was a delight to see the quality of supervision they received and the support that they were given.
In the late 1980s, I was editing the Wiley Series in Family Psychology, and Bryan, together with his friend and colleague Abe Fosson, proposed a book on psychosomatic disorders in childhood. Bryan’s preferred title was ‘Children Talking with their Bodies’, a great metaphor but not a title that the publishers felt would direct potential readers to the book. We compromised on ‘Childhood Illness: The Psychosomatic Approach: Children Talking with Their Bodies’, and the book was published in 1989.
A few years later, in 1994, Bryan told me that he was working to establish a new journal that would directly inform the clinical work of child psychologists and psychiatrists. He asked me to work with him on ideas for the journal, which he wanted to be significantly different in tone from the journals that reported scientific findings with scant reference to clinical practice. CCPP was launched in 1995, and it was immediately popular. It has made a huge impact in its 20 years.
I left the board of the journal after 10 years and after that I only met Bryan occasionally. Then, in 2013, I arrived in Krakow airport and noticed a taxi driver holding a placard with the name ‘Bryan Lask’. I waited, and we both were delighted at the coincidence that led to this chance meeting. We then arranged to meet again when Bryan was teaching in Cardiff, and this gave us the opportunity to catch up on our current interests. Bryan had not been well, but he was still hard at work, still developing new ideas and still helping others to think through their ideas and to get their thoughts into print. He was a generous and gentle man who contributed a great deal over his long and distinguished career.
Kenn Nunn
I was sitting in a restaurant with psychiatrists and psychologists who were chatting about the conference I and Bryan Lask were attending together. I had been seated next to Lionel Hersov. Lionel was the senior clinical consultant child psychiatrist who partnered with Michael Rutter to produce the first editions of the now famous textbook of child psychiatry. Lionel was a stunningly good clinician, a very thoughtful writer and a first class human being. He told me that he was worried that child psychiatry and psychology journals were becoming too clever for their audiences. He was very pessimistic about the future relationship between the world of academia and the world of clinical struggle. I was perplexed and, to be frank, somewhat stunned. After the meal, I told Bryan what Lionel had said. He knitted his brow and looked me straight in the eye through his, then, very substantial glasses. He replied that the problem was that most journals were not clever enough because they were not clear, brief and saying something meaningful for those grappling with clinical realities. The next thing I knew he was organising to launch a new journal.
He hated intellectual cabals in which a small number of ‘clever clogs’, as he called them, decided what was good for everyone else and poured scorn on anyone who disagreed with them. Bryan could be tyrannical about jargon, tenacious about what point was being made and in what order, and almost child-like in his love of innovation by young people. He loved clinical immediacy in his writing and conceptual depth stated simply. He saw no conflict between idea and action, individual and systemic, body and mind. Yet he loved debates and promoted them at various times in the journals he began. What has amazed me since the founding of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP) has been the way the cabals of ‘clever clogs’ have begun to do the same thing. Clinicians who want conceptual depth presented clearly and academics who are addressing clinical relevance, voting with their feet, have frightened traditional journals to adapt or perish. Bryan captured a broad-based concern in the child psychology and psychiatry community. It was characteristic of me to talk about a problem. It was characteristic of Bryan to do something and do it effectively.
Arlene Vetere
At the time of the inception of our journal, Bryan’s ideas were both pioneering and bold. He wanted to establish a journal for practitioners that practitioners would want to read and that would contain ideas, research and practices that were accessible and applicable. And in this, he succeeded. The continuing success and relevance of CCPP is testimony to his vision and his understanding of the needs of all practitioners who serve children and their families in our social and mental health communities. Thank you Bryan.