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 revolutionized how we see the defining problem of our era: anxiety.

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia…The international bestseller Hope and Help for Your Nerves, first 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 underqualified 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 first 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-of-the-art 30 years after her death. This book is the first to tell her remarkable story.

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.