Close-up of the book cover. Photo: Courtesy of Scribe UK.
‘The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code’ by Judith Hoare
Review by Reg Naulty
This is the story of the Australian doctor Claire Weekes (1903-1990). It is fascinating.
Weekes was first a zoologist, specialising in the development of the placenta in mammals, for which she received a doctorate in science. She found a species of lizard which sometimes laid eggs and sometimes gave birth to live young, which shed valuable light on the evolution of the placenta.
During her doctorate, she had nervous trouble, a racing heart accompanied by acute distress. She described the symptoms to a close friend, Marcel Aurousseau, who had been a distinguished soldier in world war one. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said, ‘we all had those in the trenches.’ He told her that her heart continued to race because she was afraid of it. It was programmed by fear. ‘All this time I have been doing this to myself?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, and laughed.
That switched a light on. She was being bluffed by fear. The best way to respond was not to fight it, but accept it. Her recipe for cure was face, accept, float, and let time pass. ‘Float’ meant something like the Buddhist attitude to thoughts: let them pass like clouds in the sky. She was offering a cure without medication, and she told her patients that they could expect to cure themselves.
She wrote a book about it (Self Help for Your Nerves) which sold 300,000 copies. In 1983 she gave six interviews on BBC TV which elicited 12,000 letters from all kinds of people. Patients used to ring her from all over the world. She never refused anyone in distress, and never charged for the calls. She used to allow patients from her hometown, Sydney, and from overseas, to stay in her house.
It is worth noting that Weekes’ own symptoms were not confined to those whom some might dismiss as fringe neurotics. Charles Darwin suffered similar symptoms. Like many others, he withdrew. That was the wrong response, she said. It was important to remain active.
Although once engaged to Aurousseau, Weekes never married. Aurousseau later married one of her best friends, and the three remained close for the rest of their lives. Weekes was good at friendship, but her friends all died before she did. She found life difficult without them.
In her twilight years, Weekes was hurt by never having been asked to speak about her work to her profession. Her colleagues tended to be suspicious of her – she wrote self-help books and had only two publications in psychiatry journals. They took a hard scientific line: where were the validation studies? Why had she not completed a randomised controlled study? She never thought she had to. Her work had been massively endorsed by her patients and readers: the twenty-third edition of Self Help for Your Nerves came into her hands not long before her death.
