The six-word mantra for overcoming anxiety:

face, accept, float, let time pass

— Claire Weekes, Dr Hazel Claire Weekes MBE

Scientist, soprano and fear-fighter

 A scientist by nature, Claire Weekes loved the physicality of singing. (Illustration by Lucy Fahey)

A pioneer of modern anxiety treatment who explored the possibilities of cognitive therapy, Dr Hazel Claire Weekes wrote: "Self Help For Your Nerves" (1962), which went on to sell more than 300,000 copies. Based on her own experiences of panic and anxiety, she developed a treatment that today be might called mindfulness.

Critical of Freudian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on sex and tracking down the original cause of distress through talk therapy, Weekes boasted of getting patients off ‘the old Viennese couch … [and out] into the world’. She believed that fear was the driver of much nervous suffering, and that many had simply been ‘tricked by their nerves’. An original cause certainly needed attention if it was still fuelling distress, but Dr Weekes discerned that often it took second place to people’s fear of "the state they were in".

Doctor Weekes exposed fear’s vast menu of bewildering and distressing symptoms and became famous for explaining the mind-body connection. People recognised themselves in the words she used, borrowed from her patients: ‘All tied up.’ ‘Headaches.’ ‘Tired and weary.’ ‘Palpitations.’ ‘Dreadful.’ ‘Nervous.’ ‘Sharp pain under the heart.’ ‘No interest.’ ‘Restless.’ ‘My heart beats like lead.’ ‘I have a heavy lump of dough in my stomach.’ ‘Heart-shakes.’ The nervous system seemed infinitely inventive. Then, bewilderment and fear of ‘what happens next’ took over.

Yet far from being possessed or crazy, Claire Weekes explained to her readers that they were ordinary people who could cure themselves once they understood how their nerves had been ‘sensitised’ and then, by following some simple steps, learn to control the savage flame of fear. ‘It is very much an illness of your attitude to fear,’ she counselled in Peace from Nervous Suffering (1972).

Claire Weekes was effectively treating the panic attack before it even had a name. She also believed that fear is the common thread that runs through many different psychological ‘disorders’, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), phobias, general anxiety disorder, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to use the formal diagnostic terms that had yet to be invented in her time. In this sense, Weekes anticipated contemporary ‘transdiagnostic’ approaches to mental health that acknowledge the commonalities across supposedly separate disorders. Mrs Weekes credited her scientific training with allowing her to see what she called ‘the trunk of the tree’ rather than being distracted by the branches.