“My heart beats too fast. My hands tremble and sweat. I feel like there’s a weight on my chest. My stomach churns. I have terrible headaches. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t even leave my house….”

In our particularly anxious time, the extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes (Amazon.com) is more relevant than ever. Her work is by no means ordinary ‘self help’ fare.

The true story of the mental-health pioneer who revolutionised how we see and heal the defining problem of our era: anxiety, Dr. Claire Weekes, M.D. (11 April 1903 – 2 June 1990)

Listen to a talk of hers to sufferers here…

And many others available at YouTube and elsewhere online.

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia … Her international bestseller Hope and Help for Your Nerves, was first published in 1962 and still in print, helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so. She also wrote other best sellers which won important attention in the medical and psychiatric fields.

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.

Review

“By thinking outside the box, and exercising extraordinary clinical sensitivity, the brilliant physician Claire Weekes created a treatment protocol to the unending benefit of tens of millions of patients over the years.”
―Dr David Barlow, professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University

“A vivid portrait of an intriguing woman ahead of her time, this is a story of hope, empowerment, and vindication.”
―Gina Perry, author of Behind the Shock Machine and The Lost Boys

“Claire Weekes found worldwide fame with her bestselling books on ‘nervous illness’ in the 1960s and 1970s―but despite gratitude from thousands of sufferers, she is almost forgotten today. This revelatory biography should change that…comprehensively capture[s] the unconventional life of this brilliant woman who was lauded for her evolutionary studies.”
―Books + Publishing

“This biography restores Weekes’s often overlooked contributions to anxiety treatment.”
―Scientific American

“With Judith Hoare’s The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code, we have a chance to learn about Weekes’s varied life and, as important, become reacquainted with her work…A splendid tribute to Claire Weekes―a tribute long overdue.”
―Sally Satel, Wall Street Journal

“In her biography of Weekes, veteran journalist Judith Hoare has rescued the Australian doctor from obscurity and placed her squarely in the history of the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders…Displaying the hallmarks of an accomplished journalist, this is a fascinating biography of a free-spirited and innovative woman, an insight into the history of evolutionary and psychiatric theories, and an introduction to Weekes’s methods and her books.”
―Carol Middleton, Australian Book Review

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.

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.

Get her groundbreaking first book Hope and Help for Your Nerves