My brother Stewart Sinclair, who has died aged 64 of multiple myeloma, began his working life as a mental health social worker, moving on to become an advocate for the criminally insane and later an expert on bereavement counselling.
Stewart was born in Golders Green, north London, to David, who ran a furniture-making business, and Betty (nee Jacobovitch), a housewife. After attending Orange Hill grammar school in Mill Hill he studied English literature at the University of East Anglia. While still a student in the early 1970s he became involved with the Anti-Apartheid Movement, working for a time as a photographer for the organisation’s newspaper.
In 1975 he took a job as a childcare officer at an assessment centre in south-east London, where he challenged the prevailing authoritarian management style, which had been drawn from the approved school system. He funded his own training at Maidstone College in Kent and in 1976 qualified with a postgraduate diploma in social work. He became a social worker with the city council in Leicester.
By the early 80s Stewart was back in London, working with disturbed adolescents and vulnerable adults, first in Lambeth and then Lewisham. He moved into forensic social work in 1988, joining the NHS Regional Forensic Psychiatry service, based initially at St George’s hospital in Tooting, south London, and from 1994 at Springfield hospital, also in Tooting, where he became the social work team leader. Around this time he also began to train social work students and other mental health professionals across the south-east of England, and from the mid-90s he gave lectures on mental health law to psychiatrists, nurses, social workers and lawyers at medical schools and at Essex University.
He went freelance in 1998, after which he was in great demand with the courts and the legal profession to provide independent reports to help them with their deliberations on behalf of people who lacked the capacity to manage their own affairs.
In 1994 Stewart’s wife, Susan (nee Dennison), died of breast cancer. He and their two young sons, Thomas and James, were subsequently featured in a television documentary on bereavement called The Long Goodbye. Stewart helped to start up a counselling service for parents unmoored by the loss of their partners, which he continued to run for a decade at St Christopher’s Hospice in south-east London, under the aegis of the Candle project. He wrote a number of academic papers on the topic of bereavement as well as chapters in various books.
Stewart was also a passionate botanist and led plant collecting expeditions to the West Indies. When he realised that he could no longer maintain his three greenhouses, he donated his collection of exotics to the Horniman Museum in south London.
He is survived by his second wife, Ruth (nee Owen), by Thomas and James, and by me.
