Movers and shakers

As many of this Journal's readers will know, our Founding Editor, Bryan Lask, sadly died on 25 October 2015. The last Editorial he wrote, entitled Compassion and coercion, was published in the previous issue of Advances in Eating Disorders (Vol. 3, No.3, 233–234), having been written in July. On submitting it for my approval as Co-Editor, Bryan wrote: ‘here it is; much more a personal perspective really. Underlying this is my unavoidable thinking that each time I do something it might be my last – thus everything I do has a personal and philosophical undertone'. I recommend reading this short piece as it encapsulates the essence of the man whose vision and energy led amongst many other things to the establishment of this Journal. I hope that as readers you will allow me, on this occasion, to continue on a personal and philosophical note.

Bryan was ‘a mover and a shaker’. This term has been variously defined, but one of the definitions I feel fits best, is that such a person is one ‘of energetic demeanour who initiates change and influences events’ (Martin, www.phrases.org.uk).

I had the great privilege of giving a short speech when Bryan received his Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Eating Disorders in Miami in 2011. I had been asked to highlight his achievements. In view of the limited time available, I chose to focus on four main areas. Firstly, that he was a pioneer of child and adolescent eating disorders. He had an outstanding ability to understand and communicate with children, putting them on the map at a time when they really were discounted or overlooked, insisting that they should be in our collective consciousness and drawing attention to their different needs. Through his own clinical work and research endeavours he helped countless young people and their families. Secondly, Bryan played an important role as mentor, teacher, trainer and facilitator. He had an extraordinary gift of being able to encourage, guide and support and used this to ensure that a whole generation of active, inspired, effective and productive clinicians and researchers were added to the eating disorders field. He gave people his complete attention, drew them together in positive ways and in this way alone made a significant contribution. Thirdly, Bryan had an insatiable appetite for learning, an unquenchable intellectual curiosity combined with a genuine humility about the limits of his knowledge. His enjoyment was infectious and at times he was like a child in a sweetshop. His love of discovery and openness to learning was combined with a well-developed ability to make things happen, thereby greatly enriching our field. Fourthly, he had boundless energy and enthusiasm. His genuine love of his work and the sheer amount of time and effort he invested in the field of eating disorders was quite astounding.

Bryan was indeed a person of energetic demeanour who initiated change and influenced events. A true mover and shaker.

Our field needs movers and shakers. We have much to discover, much progress still to make in diminishing the toll of eating disorders on those affected. We are still a long way from primary prevention and guaranteed cures. We remain clumsy in our attempts at intervention and are only slowly beginning to work more consistently in terms of treatment approaches, and more collaboratively and respectfully with families. But movers and shakers are not always popular. They push, provoke, challenge – all necessary in the process of change. Every mover and shaker will have his or her own critics, those who disagree and even those who dislike. But we do not enter our careers as mental health clinicians and researchers with the aim of being liked. Scientific progress is borne out of argument, attempts to disprove theories and an ability to see things that others might miss. Movers and shakers are not saints. In Miami in 2011 I said: ‘But be under no illusion, Bryan is a complex, contradictory character. Those of us privileged to have worked with him over the years have valued, appreciated, learned in immeasurable ways from him but equally been driven crazy by him’.

The origin of the term ‘movers and shakers’ is thought to be a line in a poem by the Victorian English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy called Ode, from the collection of poems ‘Music and Moonlight’ published in 1874 (Percy, 2013). The poem is about the ‘music makers’, the ‘dreamers of dreams’ who are ‘the movers and shakers of the world for ever, it seems’. The shaking here is purported to be of the foundations of conventional thinking by the strength of imagination and vision. Edward Elgar, the English musician and contemporary of O'Shaughnessy's was so affected by the poem that he set it to music. Elgar worked on his composition ‘The Music Makers’ for nearly 10 years before it was first performed in 1912. And with a poignant connection to Bryan, our mover and shaker, some of the phrasing in ‘The Music Makers’ was taken from Elgar's earlier work Nimrod, from the Enigma Variations written in 1899. Bryan chose Nimrod for his funeral and for those of us present, this was the music playing as we took our leave of him.

And so, to end on a personal note, and as I ended my brief tribute in Miami: Bryan was a big, warm hearted, generous, character who made a lasting contribution to our field over a truly extraordinary lifetime of commitment and passion for his work.

He was a true mover and a shaker to the end.