Sargant, William

   (1907–1988)

   A pioneer of physical and pharmacological treatments in British psychiatry, Sargant was the son of a devout Methodist businessman; it was said of Sargant himself that even though his religiousness lapsed, he applied the same enthusiasm to the treatment of his patients. After reading medicine at Cambridge, Sargant qualified in 1929 and served as a house officer at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. After experiencing a bout of depression, he turned from internal medicine to psychiatry, and entered the Maudsley Hospital in 1935 under Edward Mapother (1881–1940). As the Maudsley was split in two during the war, Sargant and Eliot Slater ended up together at the branch at Sutton Emergency Hospital, where Slater was clinical director and Sargant his deputy. At Sutton, they put into practice many of the new somatic therapies that were just becoming available: insulin coma, metrazol convulsion (see Convulsive Therapy: Chemical), electroconvulsive therapy, deep-sleep therapy, and leukotomy.

   In 1941, Sargant and Nellie Craske (née Wilson, M.B. 1929) described in the Lancet "modified insulin therapy," or insulin subcoma therapy, for high-grade anxiety in the war neuroses. Sargant was keen to try everything, and in 1944 he was senior author together with Slater of An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry, one of the first such manuals. (This interest in physcial treatments and psychopharmacology harvested the active dislike of Aubrey Lewis, an advocate of social and community psychiatry and uneasy about treating the brain itself.) In 1948, he became head of psychiatry at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where he helped introduce into Britain the first drug set of the psychopharmacological revolution, particularly the antidepressant monoamine oxidase inhibitors (see iproniazid), such tricyclic antidepressants as amitriptyline (see imipramine for details), and the diagnosis of "atypical depression." (See Depression: Recent Concepts: atypical depression [1959].) In the United Kingdom, Sargant is perhaps best known for his book Battle for the Mind (1957), written at the height of Cold War scares about "brain-washing." His bluff enthusiasm always made him a bit of a figure of fun in the eyes of the psychotherapeutically and social-psychiatrically oriented British establishment, but he lived to have the satisfaction of seeing many of the physcial therapies and the new drugs vindicated.