via Newsweek
By Kashmira Gander On 3/16/20 at 6:46 AM EDT
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, scientists in Australia and the U.S. believe they are a step closer to developing a vaccine and treatment to fight the new coronavirus.
Professor David Paterson, director of the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research, told Australian website News.com.au that his team used two existing drugs to deactivate the new coronavirus named SARS-CoV- 2 (not to be confused with the virus which causes SARS), in test tubes. One drug is used against HIV and the other, called chloroquine, treats malaria.
Paterson said the HIV drug was given to some of the first patients to be diagnosed with COVID-19 in Australia, and caused the "disappearance of the virus." The patients have since recovered, he said.
The patients "all did very, very well when they were treated with the HIV drug.
"That's reassuring ... that we're onto something really good here," he said.
The drugs could be called a "treatment or a cure," and a "potentially effective treatment" if found to be effective, he said.
However, Paterson stressed it is important to test the drugs methodically "to give patients "the absolute best treatment rather than just someone's guesses or someone's anecdotal experiences from a few people."
"There have already been patients treated with these in Australia and there's been successful outcomes but it hasn't been done in a controlled or a comparative way," he said.
By the end of March, the team plans to have "very rapidly" enrolled COVID-19 patients on a clinical trial to test the treatment in 50 hospitals across Australia. They will investigate whether the drugs are most effective together or individually.
Meanwhile in the U.S., scientists are due to give a participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 their first dose of the preparation on Monday, a government official to the Associated Press news agency on a condition of anonymity, as the decision had not been made public.
The trial is the first for a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 in people, according to Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle where it's being conducted. The investigational vaccine was created by the biotech company Moderna.
Participants can't be infected by the investigational vaccine called mRNA-1273 as it does not contain SARS-CoV-2, the institution said in a news release. Instead, it contains a genetic code made in a lab, which makes the process of developing the preparation faster.
Over a period of 14 months, a total of 45 participants will take part in the first phase of the trial which will test how safe different doses of the vaccine are, and whether it kicks the immune system into action. The scientists will investigate how effective the vaccine is later down the line. Participants in the trial are required to be aged between 18 to 55-years-old and can't have health conditions or take medications which affect the immune system. Each will receive a total of $1,100 for taking part in the trial.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak started in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, over 169,000 cases have been confirmed and more than 77,000 people have recovered. A total of 6,513 people have died. As indicated in the map by Statista below the virus has reached every continent except Antarctica.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Canada Investigates China’s Biological Espionage
By
GreatGameIndia -
August 8, 2019 | Last modified on February 29th, 2020 at 9:55 pm,
Canada has launched an investigation into China’s Biological Espionage. Bio-warfare experts question why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China.
In a table-top pandemic exercise at Johns Hopkins University last year, a pathogen based on the emerging Nipah virus was released by fictional extremists, killing 150 million people.
A less apocalyptic scenario mapped out by a blue-ribbon U.S. panel envisioned Nipah being dispersed by terrorists and claiming over 6,000 American lives.
Scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) have also said the highly lethal bug is a potential bio-weapon.
But this March that same lab shipped samples of the henipavirus family and of Ebola to China, which has long been suspected of running a secretive biological warfare program.
China strongly denies it makes germ weapons, and Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public-health research worldwide. Sharing of such samples internationally is relatively standard practice.
But some experts are raising questions about the March transfer, which appears to be at the centre of a shadowy RCMP investigation and dismissal of a top scientist at the Winnipeg-based NML.
“I would say this Canadian ‘contribution’ might likely be counterproductive,” said Dany Shoham, a biological and chemical warfare expert at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. “I think the Chinese activities … are highly suspicious, in terms of exploring (at least) those viruses as BW agents. “
James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in biowarfare at the U.S. Special Operations Command, said it’s worrisome on a few fronts.
China’s growing investment in bio-science, looser ethics around gene-editing and other cutting-edge technology and integration between government and academia raise the spectre of such pathogens being weaponized, he said.
That could mean an offensive agent, or a modified germ let loose by proxies, for which only China has the treatment or vaccine, said Giordano, co-head of Georgetown’s Brain Science and Global Law and Policy Program.
“This is not warfare, per se,” he said. “But what it’s doing is leveraging the capability to act as global saviour, which then creates various levels of macro and micro economic and bio-power dependencies.”
Asked if the possibility of the Canadian germs being diverted into a Chinese bio weapons program is connected to other upheaval at the microbiology lab, Public Health Agency of Canada spokeswoman Anna Maddison said this week the agency “continues to look into the administrative matter.”
The agency divulged last week that it sent samples of Ebola and henipavirus — which includes Nipah and the related Hendra — to China in March. It was meant for virus research, part of the agency’s mission to back international public-health research, a spokesman said.
Last month, an acclaimed NML scientist — Xiangguo Qiu — was reportedly escorted out of the lab along with her husband, another biologist, and members of her research team. The agency said it was investigating an “administrative issue,” and had referred a possible policy breach to the RCMP. Little more has been said about the affair.
China has been a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention since 1984, and has repeatedly insisted it is abiding by the treaty that bans developing bio-weapons.
But suspicions have persisted, with the U.S. State Department and other agencies stating publicly as recently as 2009 that they believe China has offensive biological agents.
Though no details have appeared in the open literature, China is “commonly considered to have an active biological warfare program,” says the Federation of American Scientists. An official with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defence charged last month China is the world leader in toxin “threats.”
In a 2015 academic paper, Shoham – of Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – asserts that more than 40 Chinese facilities are involved in bio-weapon production.
China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences actually developed an Ebola drug – called JK-05 — but little has been divulged about it or the defence facility’s possession of the virus, prompting speculation its Ebola cells are part of China’s bio-warfare arsenal, Shoham told the National Post.
Ebola is classified as a “category A” bioterrorism agent by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning it could be easily transmitted from person to person, would result in high death rates and “might cause panic.” The CDC lists Nipah as a category C substance, a deadly emerging pathogen that could be engineered for mass dissemination.
Nipah, which was first seen in Malaysia in 1998, has caused a series of outbreaks across east and south Asia, with death rates mostly over 50 per cent, and as high as 100 per cent, according to World Health Organization figures. It can cause encephalitis, an often-fatal brain swelling, and has no known treatment or vaccine.
The Johns Hopkins exercise — called Clade X — involved a version of Nipah modified to be more easily passed between people. America’s Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefence prefaced its 2015 report with a scenario involving the intentional release of Nipah by aerosol spray.
China’s extensive and controversial use of CRISPR gene-editing and weaponizing Biotechnology makes it conceivable the country could bio-engineer germs like Nipah to make them even more dangerous, Giordano said.
GreatGameIndia -
August 8, 2019 | Last modified on February 29th, 2020 at 9:55 pm,
Canada has launched an investigation into China’s Biological Espionage. Bio-warfare experts question why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China.
In a table-top pandemic exercise at Johns Hopkins University last year, a pathogen based on the emerging Nipah virus was released by fictional extremists, killing 150 million people.
A less apocalyptic scenario mapped out by a blue-ribbon U.S. panel envisioned Nipah being dispersed by terrorists and claiming over 6,000 American lives.
Scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) have also said the highly lethal bug is a potential bio-weapon.
But this March that same lab shipped samples of the henipavirus family and of Ebola to China, which has long been suspected of running a secretive biological warfare program.
China strongly denies it makes germ weapons, and Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public-health research worldwide. Sharing of such samples internationally is relatively standard practice.
But some experts are raising questions about the March transfer, which appears to be at the centre of a shadowy RCMP investigation and dismissal of a top scientist at the Winnipeg-based NML.
“I would say this Canadian ‘contribution’ might likely be counterproductive,” said Dany Shoham, a biological and chemical warfare expert at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. “I think the Chinese activities … are highly suspicious, in terms of exploring (at least) those viruses as BW agents. “
James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in biowarfare at the U.S. Special Operations Command, said it’s worrisome on a few fronts.
China’s growing investment in bio-science, looser ethics around gene-editing and other cutting-edge technology and integration between government and academia raise the spectre of such pathogens being weaponized, he said.
That could mean an offensive agent, or a modified germ let loose by proxies, for which only China has the treatment or vaccine, said Giordano, co-head of Georgetown’s Brain Science and Global Law and Policy Program.
“This is not warfare, per se,” he said. “But what it’s doing is leveraging the capability to act as global saviour, which then creates various levels of macro and micro economic and bio-power dependencies.”
Asked if the possibility of the Canadian germs being diverted into a Chinese bio weapons program is connected to other upheaval at the microbiology lab, Public Health Agency of Canada spokeswoman Anna Maddison said this week the agency “continues to look into the administrative matter.”
The agency divulged last week that it sent samples of Ebola and henipavirus — which includes Nipah and the related Hendra — to China in March. It was meant for virus research, part of the agency’s mission to back international public-health research, a spokesman said.
Last month, an acclaimed NML scientist — Xiangguo Qiu — was reportedly escorted out of the lab along with her husband, another biologist, and members of her research team. The agency said it was investigating an “administrative issue,” and had referred a possible policy breach to the RCMP. Little more has been said about the affair.
China has been a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention since 1984, and has repeatedly insisted it is abiding by the treaty that bans developing bio-weapons.
But suspicions have persisted, with the U.S. State Department and other agencies stating publicly as recently as 2009 that they believe China has offensive biological agents.
Though no details have appeared in the open literature, China is “commonly considered to have an active biological warfare program,” says the Federation of American Scientists. An official with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defence charged last month China is the world leader in toxin “threats.”
In a 2015 academic paper, Shoham – of Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – asserts that more than 40 Chinese facilities are involved in bio-weapon production.
China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences actually developed an Ebola drug – called JK-05 — but little has been divulged about it or the defence facility’s possession of the virus, prompting speculation its Ebola cells are part of China’s bio-warfare arsenal, Shoham told the National Post.
Ebola is classified as a “category A” bioterrorism agent by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning it could be easily transmitted from person to person, would result in high death rates and “might cause panic.” The CDC lists Nipah as a category C substance, a deadly emerging pathogen that could be engineered for mass dissemination.
Nipah, which was first seen in Malaysia in 1998, has caused a series of outbreaks across east and south Asia, with death rates mostly over 50 per cent, and as high as 100 per cent, according to World Health Organization figures. It can cause encephalitis, an often-fatal brain swelling, and has no known treatment or vaccine.
The Johns Hopkins exercise — called Clade X — involved a version of Nipah modified to be more easily passed between people. America’s Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefence prefaced its 2015 report with a scenario involving the intentional release of Nipah by aerosol spray.
China’s extensive and controversial use of CRISPR gene-editing and weaponizing Biotechnology makes it conceivable the country could bio-engineer germs like Nipah to make them even more dangerous, Giordano said.
Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens
via Nature
Maximum-security biolab is part of plan to build network of BSL-4 facilities across China.
A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.
Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats.
“It will offer more opportunities for Chinese researchers, and our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world,” says George Gao, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology in Beijing. There are already two BSL-4 labs in Taiwan, but the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan, would be the first on the Chinese mainland.
The lab was certified as meeting the standards and criteria of BSL-4 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January. The CNAS examined the lab’s infrastructure, equipment and management, says a CNAS representative, paving the way for the Ministry of Health to give its approval. A representative from the ministry says it will move slowly and cautiously; if the assessment goes smoothly, it could approve the laboratory by the end of June.
BSL-4 is the highest level of biocontainment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial. The first BSL-4 lab in Japan was built in 1981, but operated with lower-risk pathogens until 2015, when safety concerns were finally overcome.
The expansion of BSL-4-lab networks in the United States and Europe over the past 15 years — with more than a dozen now in operation or under construction in each region — also met with resistance, including questions about the need for so many facilities.
The Wuhan lab cost 300 million yuan (US$44 million), and to allay safety concerns it was built far above the flood plain and with the capacity to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, although the area has no history of strong earthquakes. It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences approved the construction of a BSL-4 laboratory in 2003, and the epidemic of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) around the same time lent the project momentum. The lab was designed and constructed with French assistance as part of a 2004 cooperative agreement on the prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases. But the complexity of the project, China’s lack of experience, difficulty in maintaining funding and long government approval procedures meant that construction wasn’t finished until the end of 2014.
The lab’s first project will be to study the BSL-3 pathogen that causes Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever: a deadly tick-borne virus that affects livestock across the world, including in northwest China, and that can jump to people.
Future plans include studying the pathogen that causes SARS, which also doesn’t require a BSL-4 lab, before moving on to Ebola and the West African Lassa virus, which do. Some one million Chinese people work in Africa; the country needs to be ready for any eventuality, says Yuan. “Viruses don’t know borders.”
Gao travelled to Sierra Leone during the recent Ebola outbreak, allowing his team to report the speed with which the virus mutated into new strains1. The Wuhan lab will give his group a chance to study how such viruses cause disease, and to develop treatments based on antibodies and small molecules, he says.
The opportunities for international collaboration, meanwhile, will aid the genetic analysis and epidemiology of emergent diseases. “The world is facing more new emerging viruses, and we need more contribution from China,” says Gao. In particular, the emergence of zoonotic viruses — those that jump to humans from animals, such as SARS or Ebola — is a concern, says Bruno Lina, director of the VirPath virology lab in Lyon, France.
Many staff from the Wuhan lab have been training at a BSL-4 lab in Lyon, which some scientists find reassuring. And the facility has already carried out a test-run using a low-risk virus.
But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.
Yuan says that he has worked to address this issue with staff. “We tell them the most important thing is that they report what they have or haven’t done,” he says. And the lab’s international collaborations will increase openness. “Transparency is the basis of the lab,” he adds.
The plan to expand into a network heightens such concerns. One BSL-4 lab in Harbin is already awaiting accreditation; the next two are expected to be in Beijing and Kunming, the latter focused on using monkey models to study disease.
Lina says that China’s size justifies this scale, and that the opportunity to combine BSL-4 research with an abundance of research monkeys — Chinese researchers face less red tape than those in the West when it comes to research on primates — could be powerful. “If you want to test vaccines or antivirals, you need a non-human primate model,” says Lina.
But Ebright is not convinced of the need for more than one BSL-4 lab in mainland China. He suspects that the expansion there is a reaction to the networks in the United States and Europe, which he says are also unwarranted. He adds that governments will assume that such excess capacity is for the potential development of bioweapons.
“These facilities are inherently dual use,” he says. The prospect of ramping up opportunities to inject monkeys with pathogens also worries, rather than excites, him: “They can run, they can scratch, they can bite.”
Trevan says China’s investment in a BSL-4 lab may, above all, be a way to prove to the world that the nation is competitive. “It is a big status symbol in biology,” he says, “whether it’s a need or not.”
Nature
542,
399–400
(23 February 2017)
doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21487
Maximum-security biolab is part of plan to build network of BSL-4 facilities across China.
A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.
Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats.
“It will offer more opportunities for Chinese researchers, and our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world,” says George Gao, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology in Beijing. There are already two BSL-4 labs in Taiwan, but the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan, would be the first on the Chinese mainland.
The lab was certified as meeting the standards and criteria of BSL-4 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January. The CNAS examined the lab’s infrastructure, equipment and management, says a CNAS representative, paving the way for the Ministry of Health to give its approval. A representative from the ministry says it will move slowly and cautiously; if the assessment goes smoothly, it could approve the laboratory by the end of June.
BSL-4 is the highest level of biocontainment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial. The first BSL-4 lab in Japan was built in 1981, but operated with lower-risk pathogens until 2015, when safety concerns were finally overcome.
The expansion of BSL-4-lab networks in the United States and Europe over the past 15 years — with more than a dozen now in operation or under construction in each region — also met with resistance, including questions about the need for so many facilities.
The Wuhan lab cost 300 million yuan (US$44 million), and to allay safety concerns it was built far above the flood plain and with the capacity to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, although the area has no history of strong earthquakes. It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences approved the construction of a BSL-4 laboratory in 2003, and the epidemic of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) around the same time lent the project momentum. The lab was designed and constructed with French assistance as part of a 2004 cooperative agreement on the prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases. But the complexity of the project, China’s lack of experience, difficulty in maintaining funding and long government approval procedures meant that construction wasn’t finished until the end of 2014.
The lab’s first project will be to study the BSL-3 pathogen that causes Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever: a deadly tick-borne virus that affects livestock across the world, including in northwest China, and that can jump to people.
Future plans include studying the pathogen that causes SARS, which also doesn’t require a BSL-4 lab, before moving on to Ebola and the West African Lassa virus, which do. Some one million Chinese people work in Africa; the country needs to be ready for any eventuality, says Yuan. “Viruses don’t know borders.”
Gao travelled to Sierra Leone during the recent Ebola outbreak, allowing his team to report the speed with which the virus mutated into new strains1. The Wuhan lab will give his group a chance to study how such viruses cause disease, and to develop treatments based on antibodies and small molecules, he says.
The opportunities for international collaboration, meanwhile, will aid the genetic analysis and epidemiology of emergent diseases. “The world is facing more new emerging viruses, and we need more contribution from China,” says Gao. In particular, the emergence of zoonotic viruses — those that jump to humans from animals, such as SARS or Ebola — is a concern, says Bruno Lina, director of the VirPath virology lab in Lyon, France.
Many staff from the Wuhan lab have been training at a BSL-4 lab in Lyon, which some scientists find reassuring. And the facility has already carried out a test-run using a low-risk virus.
But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.
Yuan says that he has worked to address this issue with staff. “We tell them the most important thing is that they report what they have or haven’t done,” he says. And the lab’s international collaborations will increase openness. “Transparency is the basis of the lab,” he adds.
The plan to expand into a network heightens such concerns. One BSL-4 lab in Harbin is already awaiting accreditation; the next two are expected to be in Beijing and Kunming, the latter focused on using monkey models to study disease.
Lina says that China’s size justifies this scale, and that the opportunity to combine BSL-4 research with an abundance of research monkeys — Chinese researchers face less red tape than those in the West when it comes to research on primates — could be powerful. “If you want to test vaccines or antivirals, you need a non-human primate model,” says Lina.
But Ebright is not convinced of the need for more than one BSL-4 lab in mainland China. He suspects that the expansion there is a reaction to the networks in the United States and Europe, which he says are also unwarranted. He adds that governments will assume that such excess capacity is for the potential development of bioweapons.
“These facilities are inherently dual use,” he says. The prospect of ramping up opportunities to inject monkeys with pathogens also worries, rather than excites, him: “They can run, they can scratch, they can bite.”
Trevan says China’s investment in a BSL-4 lab may, above all, be a way to prove to the world that the nation is competitive. “It is a big status symbol in biology,” he says, “whether it’s a need or not.”
Nature
542,
399–400
(23 February 2017)
doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21487
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Face, accept, float, let time pass: Claire Weekes' anxiety cure holds true decades on
via The Age
On October 23, 1977, a diminutive Australian stepped onto the stage in New York. The audience saw an elderly woman whose regular uniform was a tweed skirt, twinset, spectacles, and sensible brown lace-up shoes with low heels. Her dark hair was permed and for adornment, she wore a string of pearls. At the age of 74, Dr Claire Weekes was the guest speaker at the 18th Annual Fall Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. She was an unusual choice for this gathering, as she ranked as an unqualified outsider.
However, Weekes had one measurable claim to fame: her books on anxiety were a global sensation, hitting the bestseller lists in the US and the UK from the early 1960s onwards. She’d found a popular audience by identifying and describing the havoc nervous illness could create, and explaining and treating it in a fresh way. Weekes had been invited to address this professional association despite divided opinion over her approach. Many psychiatrists had heard of her methods from their patients, and a number accepted that some patients they had treated unsuccessfully had read her books and felt, if not entirely cured, then on the way to recovery.
While her audience saw a populist, Weekes started life as a scholar, an evolutionary scientist. In 1930 she made history as the first woman to gain a doctorate of science at the University of Sydney, and also won the university medal in zoology. By then she already had an international reputation in her field, which lives as vigorously today in academic circles as her work on nerves thrives in the popular market.
In 1945, she qualified as a medical doctor, eventually becoming a specialist general physician dealing with difficult-to-diagnose cases. She then hurdled what was then the highest bar in medicine, being selected as a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Her medical peers recognised what went unappreciated by her New York audience: Weekes was a scientist and a doctor who had mastered an understanding of the nervous system.
Yet on the podium in New York, Weekes inspired no awe and many in the audience dismissed her as offering nothing more than the equivalent of grandmotherly advice. She was the author of self-help books, not a psychiatrist, and she was in huge demand in the media. Her fame invited critical attention to her lack of specialist credentials, which was enough to wound her reputation in her own profession.
The psychiatrists in the New York audience fell into one of two schools. They were either psychoanalysts, who followed the techniques of Sigmund Freud and his intellectual descendants, or cognitive behaviourists, who worked on changing habits of thought and associated behaviours. Weekes’ approach could not have been further from that of Freud. Referring to the legendary psychiatrist’s pioneering technique of interrogating his patients while they were prone, Weekes boasted of being “one of the first to deal a blow at the old Viennese couch technique. I led them out of the consulting room, into the world where they were to live successfully.” She was equally critical of attempts by the behaviourists to “desensitise” their patients using relaxation techniques.
She understood that trying to teach a patient to relax in the face of phobia or panic was not only counterproductive but an almost impossible mission. Instead, she argued that by fully experiencing the panic, the individual learnt it was possible to “pass through” to the other side. Their nervous system needed to be reordered, which they could learn to do themselves. They didn’t then need a shepherd or psychiatrist.
“To recover, they must know how to face, accept and go through panic until it no longer matters …” Weekes said. “Recovery is in their own hands, not in drugs, not in avoidance of panic, not in ‘getting used to’ difficult situations, nor in desensitisation by suggestion. Permanent recovery lies in the patient’s ability to know how to accept the panic until he no longer fears it.”
The New York audience made her acutely aware of their disdain. They looked at their watches and talked among themselves, and the famous South African psychiatrist Dr Joseph Wolpe tore her to pieces after she dared challenge an approach to treatment that he favoured. At least one psychiatrist in the audience appreciated her pioneering work, however. Dr Manuel Zane, who ran a New York clinic for anxiety and phobia, had firsthand experience of the success of her method, even with intractable cases.
“The remarkable thing was that patients came to me talking about her,” Zane wrote in a nomination he made for Weekes for a Nobel Prize in the late 1980s. “That was the difference between Weekes and other professionals. She was coming to us from where the patient is, and not from our top, where we were telling patients what it’s all about, why they are the way they are.” Weekes also offered something unique to the field: hope.
Years later, Weekes chided another professional audience. “I am aware that many therapists believe there is no permanent cure for nervous illness. When I was on the radio some years ago in New York with a physician and a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist corrected me when I used the word ‘cure’ and said, ‘You mean remission, don’t you, Dr Weekes? We never speak of curing nervous illness!’ I told her that I had cured far too many nervously ill people to be afraid to use the word.”
It was a provocative claim, but one that sat on an unshakeable foundation. Weekes’ work anticipated advances made decades later in both neurology and psychiatry, and her approach, akin to modern psychology’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has been vindicated. She changed the way anxiety was understood and treated, yet her huge global footprint is invisible, and her achievement remains largely unrecognised by professionals.
Hazel Claire Weekes was born in 1903 into a modest middle-class Sydney home. Her father, Ralph, was a musician, and this clever eldest daughter of four children was the favourite of her mother Fan, a preference all too obvious to Weekes’ two brothers and younger sister. Fiercely proud of this child, who showed early scholarly success, Fan determined to see her daughter fulfil her promise. So off Weekes went to Sydney University, securing her first-class honours degree in science and university medal.
In 1928, at the age of 25, she identified a new challenge: a Rockefeller Fellowship, with which she planned to further her evolutionary studies in England after completing her PhD. But before she got there, she lost her footing and found herself in freefall. It started with a sore throat, followed by a botched operation on septic tonsils resulting in a haemorrhage.
“I’d had severely infected tonsils. I’d eaten very little for months and had lost two stone,” she said years later in an interview with the BBC. For a small, slightly built woman, 13 kilograms was a significant weight loss. In her weakened state, she experienced heart palpitations and was referred to a Sydney specialist she knew as a “famous cardiologist”, who gave her injections of calcium, which had little or no effect.
Fragile, emaciated, and with a racing heart, Weekes was a puzzle to her local doctor, who finally, with scant evidence, made a monumental diagnosis. He concluded she had contracted the dreaded disease of the day, tuberculosis. “I thought I was dying,” she recalled in a letter to a friend. “I was sent away to the country and I was told that I must make no effort, not even to pull a blind down.” Tuberculosis invoked the terror of the Black Plague of earlier years; the public response to it was a preview of that to the HIV/AIDS epidemic to come generations later.
Her studies were put on hold, and the young woman who hated being alone was packed off to the Waterfall State Sanatorium, 38 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD. Here there was no occupation and no one to keep Weekes company in the face of the death and dying around her. Her heart continued to race. “I was more or less confined to lying on the couch, with nothing much to do, and six months on my hands. So that I knew what it was to become introverted, worried,” she said of that period.
The sanatorium was the perfect petri dish for a fear that would grip and not let go. Yet Weekes was one of the lucky ones, for, after six months, the doors of the sanatorium swung open. The doctors concluded a mistake had been made; that she’d been wrongly diagnosed. Far from being relieved, Weekes felt immeasurably worse. Now she was convinced that she had a serious heart complaint as the tachycardia, or racing heart, was unceasing. Once outside the sanatorium, she was terrified and overwhelmed.
“I can remember, I had lost all confidence in what I could do, because I’d been told, ‘You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that!’ I remember walking out alone and thinking, ‘I wonder if I can walk as far as the corner of that street?’ I remember being aware of every footstep I took, and wondering how much faith I could still have in my body to get there,” she said in a media interview years later.
Rather than immediately returning to university, she chose to recuperate in “the country” with a female friend who was married to a doctor. Weekes hoped for some advice on her heart problems, but instead, found more medical incompetence.
“My heart would palpitate if I woke up at night, just the shock of waking up would make it accelerate. I can remember very clearly how, one night, I called out to her when my heart was beating fiercely and thought my last gasp was coming. Her husband, the doctor, said, ‘No. I won’t go to help her. She’ll think she’s worse than she really is!’”
The doctor was right in one respect. There was nothing wrong with Weekes’ heart. She was to live for another six decades. However, something important had gone unexplained. It was fear that was managing her heartbeat, and, without knowing this, she was trapped in a vicious cycle. It would be years before she cracked the anxiety code.
In 1929, aged 26 and not long out of the sanatorium, an unsteady Weekes boarded a Dutch liner. With a professional record that eluded most men of her generation, and the backing of eminent scientists in her field, she was finally heading to England on that Rockefeller scholarship, bound for University College London, where she would continue her studies in evolution.
The rhythm and vibrations of the ship helped camouflage the movements in her body, and she regained composure for the first time in two years. Yet on stepping ashore, a rapidly beating heart reclaimed her. The return of her symptoms was devastating. At night, she would just be dropping off to sleep when she’d wake with a start. “Then I would sit up for hours for fear that I would die if I lay down.” There was no way out. Newly arrived in London but close to collapse, she felt keenly the paradox of her situation. “I had everything to live for and I knew it. I had achieved so much, the whole of life lay before me, but I was incapacitated.”
The potency of this experience would inform her advice, many years later, to patients and readers.
She knew the return of fear carried with it real despair, the death of the hope so badly needed but impossible to secure. In her books, she had a typically practical word to describe this state: simply, a “setback”. It was not defeat, she counselled, but was to be embraced as an opportunity to practise.
Stress, fear and panic could return, but it was possible to learn how to ride the terrifying waves back to the shoreline. In this way, what she would later call “the habit of fear” could be broken. Not long after she began working in her University College lab, a friend came to visit. Beyond dissembling, her first words to him were: “Oh, I can’t take this any longer. I’ve had it!” When told of her racing heart and indescribable distress, far from being surprised or concerned, he shrugged.
“That is nothing,” he said. “Those are only the symptoms of nerves. We all had those in the [World War I] trenches.” He told Weekes that her heart continued to race because she was frightened of it. It was programmed by her fear. This made immediate sense. “All the time I have been doing this to myself?” she asked. “He said ‘yes’ and laughed,” she would later recount.
His words spoke to the scientist in Weekes. War offered empirical examples: men got scared, their hearts raced, and they often continued to race after the threat had passed. Her friend, decorated for bravery in the savage battle of the Somme, had noticed that he and his fellow soldiers had become distressed by their racing hearts, which further aroused and primed them for panic. Yet there was nothing wrong with their hearts. They were consumed with a fear that felt overwhelming in the body, so the mind concluded something was terribly wrong and continued to feed the fear.
Fear could not be extinguished by the rational brain. Thinking inevitably lost the battle to feeling. Weekes’ substantial cognitive abilities, which delivered scholarships, awards and opportunities, were sidelined by an all-consuming dread. It was this feeling she was desperate to extinguish, this feeling against which she fought so futilely, this feeling that was accompanied by racing panicked thoughts.
The discovery that she’d been frightened of fear itself was a profound revelation. Weekes was shocked that not one of the handful of doctors and specialists she’d consulted had explained how fear could have such a deranging effect on the body. She immediately grasped the point that she needed to stop fighting the fear, an instinctive response yet counterproductive. There was no benefit gained by striving, trying to think rationally, or attempting to exercise willpower. She later reported it as the breakthrough insight.
“After my friend told me the cause, I just lay as calmly as I could, ‘Okay, I’ll just go to sleep, palpitating if necessary.’ ” When she ceased engaging so intensely with her symptoms, her heartbeat returned to normal. “The whole thing cleared up,” as she put it. Once she understood “fear” was bluffing her, she decided to ignore the messenger. She accepted the palpitations instead of fighting them. No battle, no fighting. The keyword was “acceptance”.
The turnaround was swift. If Weekes had been devastated by her lack of understanding of what ailed her, she now felt exhilarated, liberated by an explanation from what had been incomprehensible suffering. With this new understanding, she regained control. Her friend had planted the seed for the bestselling books that Weekes would eventually write, but years of professional medical experience were needed to shape this single brilliant insight of acceptance into a comprehensive understanding of the anxiety state.
Weekes’ own distress, which had so piqued her interest in “nerves”, was to find its professional purpose back in Sydney, when she began practising as a doctor, first in Bondi and then as a specialist general physician in Macquarie Street. Here she learnt that panic and anxiety played a medley of dissonant bodily tunes, from breathing, swallowing and digestive difficulties to headaches, dizziness and muscle fatigue among many others.
Now other doctors began to refer their difficult cases to her. With the support of her partner, the accomplished pianist Elizabeth (Beth) Coleman, and her mother Fan, she had unlimited time and sympathy for anxious patients. Determined not to be like the doctor who had long ago failed to ease her own suffering by explaining the effects of fear on mind and body, her dedication to those she deemed nervously ill went far beyond any normal professional boundary. She even invited some of them to live in her home, to better help their recovery.
Weekes knew the effect anxiety had on the body, later describing in her books “the whiplash of panic” and the “electrifying quality of sensitised panic” to communicate to a non-sufferer the way in which continued distress prepared the body to ever more swiftly respond. The nervous system became primed to experience anxiety more quickly and savagely than ever. It had become “sensitised”, and understanding this process was the key to recovery. Desensitisation would follow as a natural consequence. That is, there was no need to practise becoming desensitised to whatever was particularly feared.
So instead of structured exposure to fears, she prescribed total acceptance of the fear as the way out of distress and panic. The problem was inside, not outside. To address it required total acceptance of what felt unacceptable. For it was exactly this fighting against tension, fear, anxiety and panic that perpetuated the problem. Weekes’ treatment protocol was just six words: face, accept, float, let time pass. It was not designed to eradicate all the stresses of life, but to enable people to find their own way out of distress. It was, she would later say, simple but not always easy. Her point was that it worked.
Weekes put her success as a doctor down to her scientific training, telling the BBC years later that it allowed her to see the trunk of the tree, rather than being distracted by the leaves. She had a gift for discerning the relationship between the mind and the body – what was clinical illness and what were symptoms driven by fear and anxiety. Understanding fear and its relationship to physical illness had become a mission.
Such was her success that throughout the 1950s, people were referred to her from across the nation.
She came to believe she had something unique to offer the huge, unmet market for effective treatment for severe anxiety. In 1962, she wrote the prosaically titled Self-Help for Your Nerves, and by the time she was standing on the podium in New York 15 years later, there had been two more books, which were prominently displayed in airports and translated into at least eight languages.
Two more were to follow in the next decade. She later explained to an American doctor that, instead of writing research papers, she had seen “the need was so great” that she went directly to the people.
The books were slim volumes that explained the nervous system and how it could go awry, how the mind and body were interconnected in arousal, and the trouble this could cause. Yet the clarity of work that drove the books’ runaway success also repelled professional recognition. Self-help was not yet a genre that inspired psychiatrists’ attention or respect. In a field more familiar with failure, and one riven with division, Weekes achieved success and as psychoanalysts struggled to prove that their methods worked, Weekes had the numbers running in her favour. People bought her books and queued to thank her for “saving” their lives. She was writing about “them”, and they often chose a religious metaphor to express their gratitude: the books were their “bible”.
Weekes died in 1990, aged 87. Along the way, she’d hurdled a series of different careers – evolutionary scientist, travel writer, singing coach, GP – and it was a lifetime of scholarship and deep experience of the anxiety state, as well as exceptional communications skills, that delivered the books that saved lives, and changed history.
People as diverse as 1960s housewives, the daughter of Richard Nixon’s drug czar, a British television producer, the late poet Les Murray, the singer Clare Bowditch, the famous US environmental activist Erin Brockovich, even prisoners have benefited from her work. The eminent anxiety specialist David Barlow, professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University, confirms she “created a treatment protocol to the unending benefit of tens of millions of patients over the years”.
It was her training as a scientist and a doctor that enabled Weekes to understand the nervous system and explain it in a way that is state-of-the-art today, although many mental health professionals are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work was discovered by a wide, thankful suffering public.
Her face, accept, float, let time pass method was based on a biological understanding of fear. Today, psychologists use a version of her method; neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain and many psychiatrists are revising the mind-body connection that was the hallmark of her work. “Acceptance” is the treatment du jour, and many mental health professionals explain fear in the same way she did all those years ago, when she identified how the body’s simple alarm system, the unconscious fight-or-flight system – which she called first fear – could be distressingly perpetuated by what she called “second fear” which kicked off a vicious “fear-adrenalin-fear cycle”, as she called it.
Weekes was chagrined by the professional resistance she faced over decades as it so starkly contrasted with her huge success in the marketplace, where she met intense, continuing gratitude. When she spoke on US television networks, switchboards were overwhelmed, and in England in the 1980s, the BBC post office could not handle the avalanche of letters that followed her appearance in an interview series on daytime television. The broadcaster was forced to rent extra space and employ outworkers to handle the mail.
Over time, the professionals were educated by their patients who had found her work so useful, and some leaders in the field, such as England’s renowned anxiety expert, Dr Isaac Marks, and Albert Ellis, considered one of the originators of the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology, came to understand the power of her books. Yet her loyal audience never needed persuading and her enduring public value is easy to identify to this day.
Her books are still being read and a social media foreign to her continues to share her work. If history has forgotten Weekes, her public remembers. In 2014, when US magazine The Atlantic invited readers to respond with tips on anxiety, just three writers were cited and their books listed. One of these was Self-Help for Your Nerves, or, as it was retitled for the US market, Hope and Help for Your Nerves. It had been written over half a century before, and Dr Claire Weekes had been dead for almost 25 years.
This is an edited extract from The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the Extraordinary Life of Dr Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare (Scribe, $40), out October 1.
On October 23, 1977, a diminutive Australian stepped onto the stage in New York. The audience saw an elderly woman whose regular uniform was a tweed skirt, twinset, spectacles, and sensible brown lace-up shoes with low heels. Her dark hair was permed and for adornment, she wore a string of pearls. At the age of 74, Dr Claire Weekes was the guest speaker at the 18th Annual Fall Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. She was an unusual choice for this gathering, as she ranked as an unqualified outsider.
However, Weekes had one measurable claim to fame: her books on anxiety were a global sensation, hitting the bestseller lists in the US and the UK from the early 1960s onwards. She’d found a popular audience by identifying and describing the havoc nervous illness could create, and explaining and treating it in a fresh way. Weekes had been invited to address this professional association despite divided opinion over her approach. Many psychiatrists had heard of her methods from their patients, and a number accepted that some patients they had treated unsuccessfully had read her books and felt, if not entirely cured, then on the way to recovery.
While her audience saw a populist, Weekes started life as a scholar, an evolutionary scientist. In 1930 she made history as the first woman to gain a doctorate of science at the University of Sydney, and also won the university medal in zoology. By then she already had an international reputation in her field, which lives as vigorously today in academic circles as her work on nerves thrives in the popular market.
In 1945, she qualified as a medical doctor, eventually becoming a specialist general physician dealing with difficult-to-diagnose cases. She then hurdled what was then the highest bar in medicine, being selected as a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Her medical peers recognised what went unappreciated by her New York audience: Weekes was a scientist and a doctor who had mastered an understanding of the nervous system.
Yet on the podium in New York, Weekes inspired no awe and many in the audience dismissed her as offering nothing more than the equivalent of grandmotherly advice. She was the author of self-help books, not a psychiatrist, and she was in huge demand in the media. Her fame invited critical attention to her lack of specialist credentials, which was enough to wound her reputation in her own profession.
The psychiatrists in the New York audience fell into one of two schools. They were either psychoanalysts, who followed the techniques of Sigmund Freud and his intellectual descendants, or cognitive behaviourists, who worked on changing habits of thought and associated behaviours. Weekes’ approach could not have been further from that of Freud. Referring to the legendary psychiatrist’s pioneering technique of interrogating his patients while they were prone, Weekes boasted of being “one of the first to deal a blow at the old Viennese couch technique. I led them out of the consulting room, into the world where they were to live successfully.” She was equally critical of attempts by the behaviourists to “desensitise” their patients using relaxation techniques.
She understood that trying to teach a patient to relax in the face of phobia or panic was not only counterproductive but an almost impossible mission. Instead, she argued that by fully experiencing the panic, the individual learnt it was possible to “pass through” to the other side. Their nervous system needed to be reordered, which they could learn to do themselves. They didn’t then need a shepherd or psychiatrist.
“To recover, they must know how to face, accept and go through panic until it no longer matters …” Weekes said. “Recovery is in their own hands, not in drugs, not in avoidance of panic, not in ‘getting used to’ difficult situations, nor in desensitisation by suggestion. Permanent recovery lies in the patient’s ability to know how to accept the panic until he no longer fears it.”
The New York audience made her acutely aware of their disdain. They looked at their watches and talked among themselves, and the famous South African psychiatrist Dr Joseph Wolpe tore her to pieces after she dared challenge an approach to treatment that he favoured. At least one psychiatrist in the audience appreciated her pioneering work, however. Dr Manuel Zane, who ran a New York clinic for anxiety and phobia, had firsthand experience of the success of her method, even with intractable cases.
“The remarkable thing was that patients came to me talking about her,” Zane wrote in a nomination he made for Weekes for a Nobel Prize in the late 1980s. “That was the difference between Weekes and other professionals. She was coming to us from where the patient is, and not from our top, where we were telling patients what it’s all about, why they are the way they are.” Weekes also offered something unique to the field: hope.
Years later, Weekes chided another professional audience. “I am aware that many therapists believe there is no permanent cure for nervous illness. When I was on the radio some years ago in New York with a physician and a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist corrected me when I used the word ‘cure’ and said, ‘You mean remission, don’t you, Dr Weekes? We never speak of curing nervous illness!’ I told her that I had cured far too many nervously ill people to be afraid to use the word.”
It was a provocative claim, but one that sat on an unshakeable foundation. Weekes’ work anticipated advances made decades later in both neurology and psychiatry, and her approach, akin to modern psychology’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has been vindicated. She changed the way anxiety was understood and treated, yet her huge global footprint is invisible, and her achievement remains largely unrecognised by professionals.
Hazel Claire Weekes was born in 1903 into a modest middle-class Sydney home. Her father, Ralph, was a musician, and this clever eldest daughter of four children was the favourite of her mother Fan, a preference all too obvious to Weekes’ two brothers and younger sister. Fiercely proud of this child, who showed early scholarly success, Fan determined to see her daughter fulfil her promise. So off Weekes went to Sydney University, securing her first-class honours degree in science and university medal.
In 1928, at the age of 25, she identified a new challenge: a Rockefeller Fellowship, with which she planned to further her evolutionary studies in England after completing her PhD. But before she got there, she lost her footing and found herself in freefall. It started with a sore throat, followed by a botched operation on septic tonsils resulting in a haemorrhage.
“I’d had severely infected tonsils. I’d eaten very little for months and had lost two stone,” she said years later in an interview with the BBC. For a small, slightly built woman, 13 kilograms was a significant weight loss. In her weakened state, she experienced heart palpitations and was referred to a Sydney specialist she knew as a “famous cardiologist”, who gave her injections of calcium, which had little or no effect.
Fragile, emaciated, and with a racing heart, Weekes was a puzzle to her local doctor, who finally, with scant evidence, made a monumental diagnosis. He concluded she had contracted the dreaded disease of the day, tuberculosis. “I thought I was dying,” she recalled in a letter to a friend. “I was sent away to the country and I was told that I must make no effort, not even to pull a blind down.” Tuberculosis invoked the terror of the Black Plague of earlier years; the public response to it was a preview of that to the HIV/AIDS epidemic to come generations later.
Her studies were put on hold, and the young woman who hated being alone was packed off to the Waterfall State Sanatorium, 38 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD. Here there was no occupation and no one to keep Weekes company in the face of the death and dying around her. Her heart continued to race. “I was more or less confined to lying on the couch, with nothing much to do, and six months on my hands. So that I knew what it was to become introverted, worried,” she said of that period.
The sanatorium was the perfect petri dish for a fear that would grip and not let go. Yet Weekes was one of the lucky ones, for, after six months, the doors of the sanatorium swung open. The doctors concluded a mistake had been made; that she’d been wrongly diagnosed. Far from being relieved, Weekes felt immeasurably worse. Now she was convinced that she had a serious heart complaint as the tachycardia, or racing heart, was unceasing. Once outside the sanatorium, she was terrified and overwhelmed.
“I can remember, I had lost all confidence in what I could do, because I’d been told, ‘You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that!’ I remember walking out alone and thinking, ‘I wonder if I can walk as far as the corner of that street?’ I remember being aware of every footstep I took, and wondering how much faith I could still have in my body to get there,” she said in a media interview years later.
Rather than immediately returning to university, she chose to recuperate in “the country” with a female friend who was married to a doctor. Weekes hoped for some advice on her heart problems, but instead, found more medical incompetence.
“My heart would palpitate if I woke up at night, just the shock of waking up would make it accelerate. I can remember very clearly how, one night, I called out to her when my heart was beating fiercely and thought my last gasp was coming. Her husband, the doctor, said, ‘No. I won’t go to help her. She’ll think she’s worse than she really is!’”
The doctor was right in one respect. There was nothing wrong with Weekes’ heart. She was to live for another six decades. However, something important had gone unexplained. It was fear that was managing her heartbeat, and, without knowing this, she was trapped in a vicious cycle. It would be years before she cracked the anxiety code.
In 1929, aged 26 and not long out of the sanatorium, an unsteady Weekes boarded a Dutch liner. With a professional record that eluded most men of her generation, and the backing of eminent scientists in her field, she was finally heading to England on that Rockefeller scholarship, bound for University College London, where she would continue her studies in evolution.
The rhythm and vibrations of the ship helped camouflage the movements in her body, and she regained composure for the first time in two years. Yet on stepping ashore, a rapidly beating heart reclaimed her. The return of her symptoms was devastating. At night, she would just be dropping off to sleep when she’d wake with a start. “Then I would sit up for hours for fear that I would die if I lay down.” There was no way out. Newly arrived in London but close to collapse, she felt keenly the paradox of her situation. “I had everything to live for and I knew it. I had achieved so much, the whole of life lay before me, but I was incapacitated.”
The potency of this experience would inform her advice, many years later, to patients and readers.
She knew the return of fear carried with it real despair, the death of the hope so badly needed but impossible to secure. In her books, she had a typically practical word to describe this state: simply, a “setback”. It was not defeat, she counselled, but was to be embraced as an opportunity to practise.
Stress, fear and panic could return, but it was possible to learn how to ride the terrifying waves back to the shoreline. In this way, what she would later call “the habit of fear” could be broken. Not long after she began working in her University College lab, a friend came to visit. Beyond dissembling, her first words to him were: “Oh, I can’t take this any longer. I’ve had it!” When told of her racing heart and indescribable distress, far from being surprised or concerned, he shrugged.
“That is nothing,” he said. “Those are only the symptoms of nerves. We all had those in the [World War I] trenches.” He told Weekes that her heart continued to race because she was frightened of it. It was programmed by her fear. This made immediate sense. “All the time I have been doing this to myself?” she asked. “He said ‘yes’ and laughed,” she would later recount.
His words spoke to the scientist in Weekes. War offered empirical examples: men got scared, their hearts raced, and they often continued to race after the threat had passed. Her friend, decorated for bravery in the savage battle of the Somme, had noticed that he and his fellow soldiers had become distressed by their racing hearts, which further aroused and primed them for panic. Yet there was nothing wrong with their hearts. They were consumed with a fear that felt overwhelming in the body, so the mind concluded something was terribly wrong and continued to feed the fear.
Fear could not be extinguished by the rational brain. Thinking inevitably lost the battle to feeling. Weekes’ substantial cognitive abilities, which delivered scholarships, awards and opportunities, were sidelined by an all-consuming dread. It was this feeling she was desperate to extinguish, this feeling against which she fought so futilely, this feeling that was accompanied by racing panicked thoughts.
The discovery that she’d been frightened of fear itself was a profound revelation. Weekes was shocked that not one of the handful of doctors and specialists she’d consulted had explained how fear could have such a deranging effect on the body. She immediately grasped the point that she needed to stop fighting the fear, an instinctive response yet counterproductive. There was no benefit gained by striving, trying to think rationally, or attempting to exercise willpower. She later reported it as the breakthrough insight.
“After my friend told me the cause, I just lay as calmly as I could, ‘Okay, I’ll just go to sleep, palpitating if necessary.’ ” When she ceased engaging so intensely with her symptoms, her heartbeat returned to normal. “The whole thing cleared up,” as she put it. Once she understood “fear” was bluffing her, she decided to ignore the messenger. She accepted the palpitations instead of fighting them. No battle, no fighting. The keyword was “acceptance”.
The turnaround was swift. If Weekes had been devastated by her lack of understanding of what ailed her, she now felt exhilarated, liberated by an explanation from what had been incomprehensible suffering. With this new understanding, she regained control. Her friend had planted the seed for the bestselling books that Weekes would eventually write, but years of professional medical experience were needed to shape this single brilliant insight of acceptance into a comprehensive understanding of the anxiety state.
Weekes’ own distress, which had so piqued her interest in “nerves”, was to find its professional purpose back in Sydney, when she began practising as a doctor, first in Bondi and then as a specialist general physician in Macquarie Street. Here she learnt that panic and anxiety played a medley of dissonant bodily tunes, from breathing, swallowing and digestive difficulties to headaches, dizziness and muscle fatigue among many others.
Now other doctors began to refer their difficult cases to her. With the support of her partner, the accomplished pianist Elizabeth (Beth) Coleman, and her mother Fan, she had unlimited time and sympathy for anxious patients. Determined not to be like the doctor who had long ago failed to ease her own suffering by explaining the effects of fear on mind and body, her dedication to those she deemed nervously ill went far beyond any normal professional boundary. She even invited some of them to live in her home, to better help their recovery.
Weekes knew the effect anxiety had on the body, later describing in her books “the whiplash of panic” and the “electrifying quality of sensitised panic” to communicate to a non-sufferer the way in which continued distress prepared the body to ever more swiftly respond. The nervous system became primed to experience anxiety more quickly and savagely than ever. It had become “sensitised”, and understanding this process was the key to recovery. Desensitisation would follow as a natural consequence. That is, there was no need to practise becoming desensitised to whatever was particularly feared.
So instead of structured exposure to fears, she prescribed total acceptance of the fear as the way out of distress and panic. The problem was inside, not outside. To address it required total acceptance of what felt unacceptable. For it was exactly this fighting against tension, fear, anxiety and panic that perpetuated the problem. Weekes’ treatment protocol was just six words: face, accept, float, let time pass. It was not designed to eradicate all the stresses of life, but to enable people to find their own way out of distress. It was, she would later say, simple but not always easy. Her point was that it worked.
Weekes put her success as a doctor down to her scientific training, telling the BBC years later that it allowed her to see the trunk of the tree, rather than being distracted by the leaves. She had a gift for discerning the relationship between the mind and the body – what was clinical illness and what were symptoms driven by fear and anxiety. Understanding fear and its relationship to physical illness had become a mission.
Such was her success that throughout the 1950s, people were referred to her from across the nation.
She came to believe she had something unique to offer the huge, unmet market for effective treatment for severe anxiety. In 1962, she wrote the prosaically titled Self-Help for Your Nerves, and by the time she was standing on the podium in New York 15 years later, there had been two more books, which were prominently displayed in airports and translated into at least eight languages.
Two more were to follow in the next decade. She later explained to an American doctor that, instead of writing research papers, she had seen “the need was so great” that she went directly to the people.
The books were slim volumes that explained the nervous system and how it could go awry, how the mind and body were interconnected in arousal, and the trouble this could cause. Yet the clarity of work that drove the books’ runaway success also repelled professional recognition. Self-help was not yet a genre that inspired psychiatrists’ attention or respect. In a field more familiar with failure, and one riven with division, Weekes achieved success and as psychoanalysts struggled to prove that their methods worked, Weekes had the numbers running in her favour. People bought her books and queued to thank her for “saving” their lives. She was writing about “them”, and they often chose a religious metaphor to express their gratitude: the books were their “bible”.
Weekes died in 1990, aged 87. Along the way, she’d hurdled a series of different careers – evolutionary scientist, travel writer, singing coach, GP – and it was a lifetime of scholarship and deep experience of the anxiety state, as well as exceptional communications skills, that delivered the books that saved lives, and changed history.
People as diverse as 1960s housewives, the daughter of Richard Nixon’s drug czar, a British television producer, the late poet Les Murray, the singer Clare Bowditch, the famous US environmental activist Erin Brockovich, even prisoners have benefited from her work. The eminent anxiety specialist David Barlow, professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University, confirms she “created a treatment protocol to the unending benefit of tens of millions of patients over the years”.
It was her training as a scientist and a doctor that enabled Weekes to understand the nervous system and explain it in a way that is state-of-the-art today, although many mental health professionals are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work was discovered by a wide, thankful suffering public.
Her face, accept, float, let time pass method was based on a biological understanding of fear. Today, psychologists use a version of her method; neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain and many psychiatrists are revising the mind-body connection that was the hallmark of her work. “Acceptance” is the treatment du jour, and many mental health professionals explain fear in the same way she did all those years ago, when she identified how the body’s simple alarm system, the unconscious fight-or-flight system – which she called first fear – could be distressingly perpetuated by what she called “second fear” which kicked off a vicious “fear-adrenalin-fear cycle”, as she called it.
Weekes was chagrined by the professional resistance she faced over decades as it so starkly contrasted with her huge success in the marketplace, where she met intense, continuing gratitude. When she spoke on US television networks, switchboards were overwhelmed, and in England in the 1980s, the BBC post office could not handle the avalanche of letters that followed her appearance in an interview series on daytime television. The broadcaster was forced to rent extra space and employ outworkers to handle the mail.
Over time, the professionals were educated by their patients who had found her work so useful, and some leaders in the field, such as England’s renowned anxiety expert, Dr Isaac Marks, and Albert Ellis, considered one of the originators of the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology, came to understand the power of her books. Yet her loyal audience never needed persuading and her enduring public value is easy to identify to this day.
Her books are still being read and a social media foreign to her continues to share her work. If history has forgotten Weekes, her public remembers. In 2014, when US magazine The Atlantic invited readers to respond with tips on anxiety, just three writers were cited and their books listed. One of these was Self-Help for Your Nerves, or, as it was retitled for the US market, Hope and Help for Your Nerves. It had been written over half a century before, and Dr Claire Weekes had been dead for almost 25 years.
This is an edited extract from The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the Extraordinary Life of Dr Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare (Scribe, $40), out October 1.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Why Can’t You Remember Your Future? Physicist Paul Davies on the Puzzlement of Why We Experience Time as Linear
via brainpickings
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.
That puzzlement is what Australian theoretical physicist Paul Davies explores in a wonderfully mind-bending passage from his altogether terrific 1995 book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (public library), which embodies my three criteria for what makes a great science book.
Davies writes:
"When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at the that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.
Another button would also send me backwards in time, of course. This button would restore my brain state and memory to what they were at that earlier date. One press, and I could be back at my early childhood, experiencing once again, for the first time, my fourth birthday…"
Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman addressed this perplexity in his model of the experiencing self and the remembering self, but for Davies the more interesting question deals not with the pure psychology of the experience but with how the accepted physics of time, seeded by Einstein’s relativity theory, gives shape to that psychological experience. He returns to the larger questions arising from his childhood thought experiments:
"With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. I could simply jump hither and thither at random, back and forth in time, rapidly moving on from any unpleasant episodes, frequently repeating the good times, always avoiding death, of course , and continuing ad infinitum. I would have no subjective impression of randomness, because at each stage the state of my brain would encode a consistent sequence of events.
[…]
The striking thing about [such] “thought experiments” is, how would my life seem any different if this button-pushing business really was going on? What does it even mean to say that I am experiencing my life in a jumpy, random sort of manner? Each instant of my experience is the experience, whatever its temporal relation to other experiences. So long as the memories are consistent, what meaning can be attached to the claim that my life happens in a jumbled sequence?"
In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying About Time, Davies goes on to probe the answer to this question by examining how the history of human thought, from St. Augustine to Einstein, has left us with a model of time that simply doesn’t reflect the nature of experience, and what we can expect from the evolution of science as we reach for more complete models of this timelessly puzzling dimension of reality.
Complement it with T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to the nature of time and Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, then revisit the historic debate that shaped our modern understanding of time.
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.
That puzzlement is what Australian theoretical physicist Paul Davies explores in a wonderfully mind-bending passage from his altogether terrific 1995 book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (public library), which embodies my three criteria for what makes a great science book.
Davies writes:
"When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at the that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.
Another button would also send me backwards in time, of course. This button would restore my brain state and memory to what they were at that earlier date. One press, and I could be back at my early childhood, experiencing once again, for the first time, my fourth birthday…"
Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman addressed this perplexity in his model of the experiencing self and the remembering self, but for Davies the more interesting question deals not with the pure psychology of the experience but with how the accepted physics of time, seeded by Einstein’s relativity theory, gives shape to that psychological experience. He returns to the larger questions arising from his childhood thought experiments:
"With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. I could simply jump hither and thither at random, back and forth in time, rapidly moving on from any unpleasant episodes, frequently repeating the good times, always avoiding death, of course , and continuing ad infinitum. I would have no subjective impression of randomness, because at each stage the state of my brain would encode a consistent sequence of events.
[…]
The striking thing about [such] “thought experiments” is, how would my life seem any different if this button-pushing business really was going on? What does it even mean to say that I am experiencing my life in a jumpy, random sort of manner? Each instant of my experience is the experience, whatever its temporal relation to other experiences. So long as the memories are consistent, what meaning can be attached to the claim that my life happens in a jumbled sequence?"
In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying About Time, Davies goes on to probe the answer to this question by examining how the history of human thought, from St. Augustine to Einstein, has left us with a model of time that simply doesn’t reflect the nature of experience, and what we can expect from the evolution of science as we reach for more complete models of this timelessly puzzling dimension of reality.
Complement it with T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to the nature of time and Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, then revisit the historic debate that shaped our modern understanding of time.
Friday, September 13, 2019
Joe Rogan goes full retard
Joe Rogan's interview with Nick Bostrom was kinda fun except for the last hour when he couldn't understand probability theory.
How the Brain Finds Meaning in Metaphor
3 minute read
You can grasp a hand. You can also grasp a concept.
One is literal. One is metaphorical. Our brains know the difference, but would we be able to understand the latter without the former?
Previous studies have suggested that our understanding of metaphors may be rooted in our bodily experience. Some functional MRI, or fMRI, brain imaging studies have indicated, for example, that when you hear a metaphor such as "she had a rough day," regions of the brain associated with tactile experience are activated. If you hear, "he's so sweet," areas associated with taste are activated. And when you hear action verbs used in a metaphorical context, like "grasp a concept," regions involved in motor perception and planning are activated.
A study by University of Arizona researcher Vicky Lai, published in the journal Brain Research, builds on this research by looking at when, exactly, different regions of the brain are activated in metaphor comprehension and what that tells us about the way we understand language.
Humans Love Talking in Metaphors
Humans use metaphors all the time; they're so ingrained in our language we often don't even notice we're doing it.
In fact, researchers have found that on average, people use a metaphor every 20 words, said Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the UA. As director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory in the UA Department of Psychology, Lai is interested in how the brain processes metaphors and other types of language.
Her latest study used EEG, or brainwave studies, to record electrical patterns in the brain when participants were presented with metaphors that contained action content, like "grasp the idea" or "bend the rules."
Study participants were shown three different sentences on a computer screen, each presented one word at a time. One sentence described a concrete action, such as, "The bodyguard bent the rod." Another was a metaphor using the same verb: "The church bent the rules." In the third sentence, the verb was replaced with a more abstract word that conveyed the same meaning as the metaphor: "The church altered the rules."
When participants saw the word "bent" used in both the literal and metaphorical context, a similar response was evoked in the brain, with the sensory-motor region being activated almost immediately – within 200 milliseconds – of the verb being presented on the screen. That response differed when "bent" was replaced with "altered."
Lai's work supports previous findings from fMRI studies, which measure brain activity changes related to blood flow; however, the EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain, provides a clearer picture of just how important the sensory motor regions of the brain may be for metaphor comprehension.
"In an fMRI, it takes time for oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood to reflect change caused by the language that was just uttered," Lai said. "But language comprehension is fast – at the rate of four words per second."
Therefore, with an fMRI, it's hard to tell whether the sensory motor region is truly necessary for understanding action-based metaphors or if it's something that's activated after comprehension has already taken place. The EEG provides a much more precise sense of timing.
"By using the brainwave measure, we tease apart the time course of what happens first," Lai said.
In the study, the near-immediate activation of the sensory motor region after the verb was displayed suggests that that region of the brain is indeed quite important in comprehension.
Exploring the Power of Language
Lai's current research extends understanding of how humans comprehend language and will help foundationally with some of the other questions her lab is exploring, such as: Can metaphoric language be used to improve people's moods? What role might language play in healthy aging? And, can metaphors aid in the learning of abstract concepts? Lai recently presented ongoing research on the use of metaphors to aid in the teaching, learning and retention of science concepts at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco.
Lai's fascination with metaphors stems from an early love of literature, which evolved into an interest in linguistics. As a linguistics master's student in Taiwan, she collected and studied hundreds of Mandarin Chinese metaphors. That eventually led her to psychology and her work at the UA.
"Understanding how the brain approaches the complexity of language allows us to begin to test how complex language impacts other aspects of cognition," she said.
This article has been republished from materials provided by the University of Arizona. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.
You can grasp a hand. You can also grasp a concept.
One is literal. One is metaphorical. Our brains know the difference, but would we be able to understand the latter without the former?
Previous studies have suggested that our understanding of metaphors may be rooted in our bodily experience. Some functional MRI, or fMRI, brain imaging studies have indicated, for example, that when you hear a metaphor such as "she had a rough day," regions of the brain associated with tactile experience are activated. If you hear, "he's so sweet," areas associated with taste are activated. And when you hear action verbs used in a metaphorical context, like "grasp a concept," regions involved in motor perception and planning are activated.
A study by University of Arizona researcher Vicky Lai, published in the journal Brain Research, builds on this research by looking at when, exactly, different regions of the brain are activated in metaphor comprehension and what that tells us about the way we understand language.
Humans Love Talking in Metaphors
Humans use metaphors all the time; they're so ingrained in our language we often don't even notice we're doing it.
In fact, researchers have found that on average, people use a metaphor every 20 words, said Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the UA. As director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory in the UA Department of Psychology, Lai is interested in how the brain processes metaphors and other types of language.
Her latest study used EEG, or brainwave studies, to record electrical patterns in the brain when participants were presented with metaphors that contained action content, like "grasp the idea" or "bend the rules."
Study participants were shown three different sentences on a computer screen, each presented one word at a time. One sentence described a concrete action, such as, "The bodyguard bent the rod." Another was a metaphor using the same verb: "The church bent the rules." In the third sentence, the verb was replaced with a more abstract word that conveyed the same meaning as the metaphor: "The church altered the rules."
When participants saw the word "bent" used in both the literal and metaphorical context, a similar response was evoked in the brain, with the sensory-motor region being activated almost immediately – within 200 milliseconds – of the verb being presented on the screen. That response differed when "bent" was replaced with "altered."
Lai's work supports previous findings from fMRI studies, which measure brain activity changes related to blood flow; however, the EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain, provides a clearer picture of just how important the sensory motor regions of the brain may be for metaphor comprehension.
"In an fMRI, it takes time for oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood to reflect change caused by the language that was just uttered," Lai said. "But language comprehension is fast – at the rate of four words per second."
Therefore, with an fMRI, it's hard to tell whether the sensory motor region is truly necessary for understanding action-based metaphors or if it's something that's activated after comprehension has already taken place. The EEG provides a much more precise sense of timing.
"By using the brainwave measure, we tease apart the time course of what happens first," Lai said.
In the study, the near-immediate activation of the sensory motor region after the verb was displayed suggests that that region of the brain is indeed quite important in comprehension.
Exploring the Power of Language
Lai's current research extends understanding of how humans comprehend language and will help foundationally with some of the other questions her lab is exploring, such as: Can metaphoric language be used to improve people's moods? What role might language play in healthy aging? And, can metaphors aid in the learning of abstract concepts? Lai recently presented ongoing research on the use of metaphors to aid in the teaching, learning and retention of science concepts at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco.
Lai's fascination with metaphors stems from an early love of literature, which evolved into an interest in linguistics. As a linguistics master's student in Taiwan, she collected and studied hundreds of Mandarin Chinese metaphors. That eventually led her to psychology and her work at the UA.
"Understanding how the brain approaches the complexity of language allows us to begin to test how complex language impacts other aspects of cognition," she said.
This article has been republished from materials provided by the University of Arizona. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.
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