Psychiatric Bulletin (2007) 31: 277. doi: 10.1192/pb.bp.107.015990
© 2007 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Derek Steinberg
John Foskett and
Gill Steinberg
Formerly Consultant Psychiatrist, Ticehurst House Hospital
Derek Steinberg was born in 1940 in Guildford and grew up in East Ham,
where his Jewish parents had a shop. His sister Maxine remembers him as an
imaginative, kind and patient big brother, who introduced her to museums and
art galleries as a child and was a source of advice and wisdom as an adult. It
was as a schoolboy that his breadth of interests emerged and his talent as an
artist first became apparent. His interest in people and everything about them
drew him to medicine, and he trained first at the London Hospital, graduating
MBBS (London) in 1965, and then his fascination with the human mind led him to
specialise in psychiatry at the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal Hospitals. He
gained the DPM (London) in 1968. Further training and work came at the
National Hospitals for Neurology and Neurosurgery, and his interest and skill
in working with children and adolescents was forged at the Park Hospital for
Children in Oxford. Derek passed the MRCPsych in 1972 and was elected FRCPsych
in 1979. He was appointed consultant and clinical tutor at Long Grove Hospital
and returned to the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal Hospitals in 1975, where he did
his major clinical work as consultant to the adolescent unit there until 1994.
This unit specialised in the assessment and treatment of young people with
severe mental health problems. From 1994 to 1997 he was consultant
psychiatrist and clinical tutor at Ticehurst House Hospital in Sussex (now
Tricehurst Priory) where he organised a new unit for young
people.
Throughout his life he was actively interested in a wide variety of
subjects, leaving a collection of approximately 8000 books on topics including
topography, philosophy, art and literature. He often carried a sketch book and
was a regular contributor of cartoons to World Medicine. From 1997 he
devoted himself to writing and consulting, drawing and sculpting in and around
the home he and his wife Gill created in Lyme Regis. That garden and house are
a tribute to their remarkable artistic and literary gifts.
Derek's time at the Bethlem Hospital was marked by his ability to nurture
the work and expertise of others, both staff and patients. Attracted to the
mental health consultancy work of the Tavistock Institute and its community
mental health training programme, he learnt to cherish the contribution of
everyone involved in the care and treatment of children, not least the
children themselves. He recognised how important art, music, drama and
education are to our mental health, and the massive contribution which
professionals in those fields can bring to the more illness-orientated
professions of medicine and nursing. He built up multidisciplinary teams which
put into practice these ideas and drew in more and more people to contribute
to the expertise and success of that unit. Such wide-ranging reflective
practice enabled him to write so helpfully and teach so effectively many
generations of mental health workers. He will be remembered by many as a kind,
witty, diplomatic and modest man, who helped his colleagues steeped in the
minutiae of modern psychiatry to see the bigger picture and to learn to
recognise the systemic, political and philosophical factors that affect our
health so much. He taught internationally in Holland, Japan, Singapore, Hong
Kong and Trinidad and Tobago.
He was the author of several books and papers on psychiatry and related
topics. He completed his last book Consciousness Reconnected while he
was undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy after a diagnosis of oesophageal
cancer. It was an enormous satisfaction to him to hold the finished volume
(with a cover illustration by his daughter Anna) when it was published in
September 2006. In many ways this book reveals the fruits of his lifetime's
pursuit of knowledge and understanding about humanity. In the foreword
Professor Peter Tyrer sums up his achievement in these words. ‘Wow. Here
we have an author who is both a polymath and a scholar, who has the courage to
incorporate psychology, neurophysiology, evolutionary theory and religion into
one volume and can give good and proper justification for it.’ He knew
and believed that science and art were but complementary reflections of the
same humanity, and wished more than anything that the ‘high
priests’ of every discipline would practise greater humility towards one
another and show more curiosity for each other's wisdom and experience. In his
last years he practised what he preached, reading widely and voraciously and
studying the Jurassic Coast, drawing and painting the West Country as he saw
it and finding the wonder of shapes in the Portland stone he sculpted. He died
on 29 October 2006. Typically, his funeral was conducted by two friends, both
Anglican priests, in the parish church at Lyme Regis. As an agnostic Jew he
would have been delighted in the unique mixture of secular, Christian and
Jewish ritual which marked his death and celebrated his life.
He is survived by his wife Gill and their two daughters, Kate and Anna.
