Radio Scope: The 1980s had the Betty Ford Clinic. This was somewhere that popped up in celebrity interviews and gossip columns with such frequency that it was easy to imagine that if your bank balance matched your drink problem, you could check in for a pleasant few days hanging out with a movie star or at least someone from your favourite soap, writes Bernice Harrison.
In the late 1990s, it was The Priory that seemed to be the clinic du jour as far as the celeb circuit went. In interviews, actors and rock stars talked about checking in for "a rest" and the group of people who were talking openly about The Priory weren't a sad, middle-aged bunch who were obviously looking at the world through decades of substance abuse; they were the uber cool hipsters, such as Kate Moss and Robbie Williams.
Even Gazza was said to have been through the door, which seemed to prove that when it came to celebrities, The Priory was a very broad church.
Maybe it's because it surfaced in the newspapers at the same time as the vogue for spa treatments was starting to catch on, but it was easy to imagine The Priory was a sort of up-market spa-like treatment centre.
Anyone who heard Dr Raj Persaud's report on his visit to The Priory in Southampton for All in the mind will know the truth is very far from that image. For a start, it's not one place - there are several institutions owned by a private company, called The Priory Group, and they range from psychiatric units to special schools. Some 59 per cent of the clients in the secure and acute units are NHS-funded, a statistic that chips away at the celebrity image pretty quickly.
In the programme, medical director Dr Austin Tate showed Dr Persuad around the Southampton facility. The vast majority of clients were self-funded or were covered by health insurance he said, and the chief reason for admission was depression. The unit caters for clients with eating disorders, to substance abusers and a mother and baby treatment centre for women suffering post-natal depression.
Dr Persuad talked to one-time client Andy Meyer, whose alcoholism was threatening to destroy his life. Desperate to get out of the cycle of sleeping and drinking, he checked in for a detox in an NHS hospital, but found the experience counterproductive to his recovery. With his wife's help, he scraped the money together to get private treatment at The Priory and he hasn't looked back.
According to Dr Tate, the treatment method, which is largely group therapy-based, has a high success rate, with 70 per cent of clients dry one year after treatment.
The cost is high at somewhere between £12,000 and £13,000 per month but, as Dr Tate says, the fees are "the same as for a coronary artery bypass".
This is a specialist mental health-themed radio programme.
However, it would have been beneficial if Dr Persuad had given a deeper insight into the clinic's methods that yield such impressive results.