Joseph H. Berke 1939-2021

I first met my friend Joe in medical school at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He was uninterested in most of the medical subjects, except for psychiatry. A psychiatrist called John Thompson, who spent time sitting for hours with people labelled schizophrenic, just being there with them in silence, especially inspired him.

Joe was a medical doctor, a psychotherapist and author of many books. In 1965, he joined a community at Kingsley Hall in the East End of London, where Dr Ronald D. Laing and colleagues were setting up an important social experiment. The point was to see whether a drama of breakdown and ‘rebirth’ could help people with severe emotional damage. The first resident in the community, Mary Barnes, was a nurse whom Ronnie Laing described as having ‘turned her face to the wall’. Here, she had the good fortune to meet Joe, who helped guide her during and after her breakdown. Together, the two of them wrote Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness.

When she was ‘down’, Mary began to paint for the first time. To make these paintings she smeared faeces with her fingers on the walls of her room. After 1967 she painted with oil on canvas, though she continued to use her fingers, and she sold many paintings. The playwright David Edgar wrote a play, Mary Barnes, based on the book, which was staged in 1978-79 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Simon Callow played Eddie (a pseudonym for Joe) and Patti Love played Mary.

In 1970 Joe co-founded the Arbours Association with me and others. Arbours was set up in London as a charitable foundation, where people who might otherwise be in-patients in psychiatry wards could live communally. Arbours also had a training programme for psychotherapists, a low-cost psychotherapy clinic, and a crisis centre. For many years Joe was director of the crisis centre. Many therapists who worked there treasure it as a crucial experience in their education and training. He was also the Arbours representati