The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code

The Extraordinary Life Of Dr Claire Weekes

The true story of the little-known mental-health pioneer who revolutionised how we see the defning problem of our era: anxiety.

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confdence, loneliness, agoraphobia … The international bestseller Self-Help for Your Nerves, frst published in 1962 and still in print, has helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so. Yet even as letters and phone calls from readers around the world flooded in, thanking her for helping to improve " and in some cases to save " their lives, Dr Claire Weekes was dismissed as underqualifed and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. Just who was this woman?

Claire Weekes was driven by a restless and unconventional mind that saw her become the frst woman to earn a Doctor of Science degree at Australia's oldest university, win global plaudits for her research into evolution, and take a turn as a travel agent, before embarking on a career in medicine. But it was a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis that would set her heart racing and push her towards integrating all she'd learned into a practical treatment for anxiety " a tried-and-true method now seen as state-ofthe-art 30 years after her death. This book is the frst to tell her remarkable story

Judith Hoare is a journalist who worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Australian Financial Review over several decades. She started her career on Chequerboard, a trailblazing social-issues television program in the 1970s, and then moved to the AFR, reporting on federal politics in Canberra. She shifted to features writing, to eventually specialise in editing long-form journalism for the newspaper, and was appointed deputy editor in 1995, a position she held for 20 years.

The Woman Who Cracked The Anxiety Code
Scribe
Author: Judith Hoare
ISBN: 9781925713381
RRP: $39.99

Interview with Judith Hoare

Question: What inspired you to write Dr Claire Weekes' story?

Judith Hoare: Having spent a long professional life as an editor for the Australian Financial Review, responsible for feature writing across the paper, I was keen to dedicate some time to a project of my own that used my journalistic skills in the service of a worthwhile project.

The great license of journalism is that you can ask questions and lift back the veil to discern something that would otherwise go unseen. Dr Claire Weekes was a perfect subject for me. She had a huge devoted public following but was invisible to history. Her books on what were quaintly called 'nerves' back in 1962 had tapped a huge market in anxiety, whose needs were not being served.

Just how she had worked out a method of treating people with such success that her books had become bestsellers. What exactly had she discovered about anxiety, and how had she discovered it?


Question: How has Dr Claire Weekes personally helped you?

Judith Hoare: I had come across her work in my 20s, when I had suffered a bout of heart palpitations after a minor surgical procedure that had led to a loss of blood. I was cleared by a cardiologist, but the palpitations continued, which convinced me there was something wrong and alarmed me.

I was to find out that Dr Weekes had a parallel experience which had inspired her books. She too had suffered from heart palpitations in her 20s which had caused her intense anxiety. Thus, her interest in 'nerves' was very personal.

I was also to discover that while her own experience of anxiety had inspired her books, it was a lifetime of scholarship and treating anxious patients as a medical doctor that gave her books their power. As well as a great gift for communication. By the time she sat down to write Self Help for Your Nerves at the age of 59 in 1962, she had deep experience of the many bewildering ways anxiety presented itself. She had treated people with panic, phobias, and obsessions. She used to say she had "heard everything."

She became a bestselling author, and pioneered treatments that are state-of-the-art today. She saw fear as the central driving force behind anxiety, most specifically, fear of fear, and she counselled acceptance of the fear as the way to bring the body and mind back into balance. No fighting, no putting up with, no looking away from – but total acceptance of the disturbing symptoms, physical and mental.

The incredible success of her books, and their continued relevance to this day, 30 years after her death vindicate her approach. Countless numbers of people use the same phrases: "She saved my life." "Her books are my Bible."


Question: How did you go about researching Dr Claire Weekes'?

Judith Hoare: Her biography offered a fascinating chase. My research began with her family, many of whom are still alive. She has a number of nieces and nephews who were very helpful in sharing their recollections of her life.

She was born in 1903 so my research took me back in time to her early family life, her family background and her education, first as a student at a selective Sydney high school and then as an academic biologist in the 1920's and 30's. This involved a lot of library work, also tapping the records of various educational institutions, the Rockefeller foundation, the Linnean Society among others. It also required tracking down individuals who had influenced her thinking, digging up her early evolutionary scholarship which gave an insight into how she understood the primal fight or flight systems that play such a disruptive role in the development of anxiety. By looking at newspaper archives I was able to track her three other careers, in singing, travel journalism and in medicine. I was also able to find out more about her lifelong partner Elizabeth Coleman, an accomplished pianist at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Whenever I could, I talked to other scholars, or individuals who may have had some knowledge of her earlier careers. She had an international reputation in evolutionary scholarship. I researched her early teachers and came across some fascinating links that led me to understand how the experience of shell-shocked soldiers in World War I had helped inform her understanding of fear as a driver of anxiety.


Question: What do you hope to achieve with The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code?

Judith Hoare: My hope is my book will help illuminate the grand achievement of a woman who has been overlooked by history, and not given the recognition she deserved as a pioneer in the treatment of anxiety.

Her books are not just helpful to people with anxiety, but her common sense explanation of the relationship between the mind and the body and her brilliantly simple insights into stress are of value to anyone.

Interview by Brooke Hunter

The Woman Who Cracked The Anxiety Code 
Scribe
Author: Judith Hoare
ISBN: 9781925713381
RRP: $39.99