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 defining problem of our era: anxiety.

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia … Dr Claire Weekes knew how to treat them, but was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. In a radical move, she had gone directly to the people. Her international bestseller Self Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so.

Weekes pioneered an anxiety treatment that is now at the cutting edge of modern psychotherapies. Her early explanation of fear, and its effect on the nervous system, is state of the art. Psychologists use her method, neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain, and many psychiatrists are revisiting the mind–body connection that was the hallmark of her unique work. Face, accept, float, let time pass: hers was the invisible hand that rewrote the therapeutic manual.

This understanding of the biology of fear could not be more contemporary — ‘acceptance’ is the treatment du jour, and all mental-health professionals explain the phenomenon of fear in the same way she did so many years ago. However, most of them are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work has found such a huge public audience. This book is the first to tell that story, and to tell Weekes’ own remarkable tale, of how a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis led to heart palpitations, beginning her fascinating journey to a practical treatment for anxiety that put power back in the hands of the individual.

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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 defining problem of our era: anxiety.

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia … Dr Claire Weekes knew how to treat them, but was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. In a radical move, she had gone directly to the people. Her international bestseller Self Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so.

Weekes pioneered an anxiety treatment that is now at the cutting edge of modern psychotherapies. Her early explanation of fear, and its effect on the nervous system, is state of the art. Psychologists use her method, neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain, and many psychiatrists are revisiting the mind–body connection that was the hallmark of her unique work. Face, accept, float, let time pass: hers was the invisible hand that rewrote the therapeutic manual.

This understanding of the biology of fear could not be more contemporary — ‘acceptance’ is the treatment du jour, and all mental-health professionals explain the phenomenon of fear in the same way she did so many years ago. However, most of them are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work has found such a huge public audience. This book is the first to tell that story, and to tell Weekes’ own remarkable tale, of how a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis led to heart palpitations, beginning her fascinating journey to a practical treatment for anxiety that put power back in the hands of the individual.

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The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes

The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes

The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes

The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes

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Overview

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

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia … Dr Claire Weekes knew how to treat them, but was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. In a radical move, she had gone directly to the people. Her international bestseller Self Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so.

Weekes pioneered an anxiety treatment that is now at the cutting edge of modern psychotherapies. Her early explanation of fear, and its effect on the nervous system, is state of the art. Psychologists use her method, neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain, and many psychiatrists are revisiting the mind–body connection that was the hallmark of her unique work. Face, accept, float, let time pass: hers was the invisible hand that rewrote the therapeutic manual.

This understanding of the biology of fear could not be more contemporary — ‘acceptance’ is the treatment du jour, and all mental-health professionals explain the phenomenon of fear in the same way she did so many years ago. However, most of them are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work has found such a huge public audience. This book is the first to tell that story, and to tell Weekes’ own remarkable tale, of how a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis led to heart palpitations, beginning her fascinating journey to a practical treatment for anxiety that put power back in the hands of the individual.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781925693751
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Publication date: 09/11/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 416
File size: 509 KB

About the Author

Judith Hoare is a journalist who worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Australian Financial Review. She started her career on Chequerboard, a trailblazing social-issues 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, features, in 1995, a position she held for 20 years.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Uncommon Sense of Claire Weekes 1

1 Misdiagnosis 17

2 Her Mother's Daughter 23

3 The Evolution of Claire 43

4 Meeting Marcel 49

5 Lizard Babies and the Lizard Brain 59

6 The Shadow of Death 67

7 Sinking and Floating 77

8 Darwin and the Heart of the Matter 85

9 Now, Here Was a Teacher 99

10 A Template for a Book 107

11 Life in a Cold Climate 117

12 The Song of Beth 127

13 Dr Weekes' European Travel Advice Bureau 139

14 The World at War 151

15 Dr Weekes, Redux 155

16 The House of Women 169

17 The Birth of a Book 183

18 Self Help for Your Nerves 195

19 Unscientific Science 207

20 Getting a Grip on the Market 215

21 A Second Home 229

22 Bad Business 237

23 Peace from Agoraphobia 245

24 A Pioneer of Fear 255

25 Living in Two Worlds 263

26 The Soulmate 271

27 Vindication 283

28 Old Age 291

29 The BBC and a Blizzard of Letters 305

30 The Sound of Closing Doors 313

31 A Blow to the Brain 321

32 Eyes on the Prize 327

33 The Nobel Nomination 335

34 Final Days 345

Epilogue: What Lives On 355

Acknowledgements 357

Notes 365

Index 383

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