Desperately Seeking Hope and Help for Your Nerves? Try Reading ‘Hope and Help for Your Nerves’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/books/hope-help-for-your-nerves-claire-weekes-virus.html

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I felt the rumblings of a panic attack just now, while I was typing. It starts with a burning sensation in my temples. My chest tightens up a little, suddenly corseted, and my vision tunnels like one of those old Western photos in which everyone is grim-faced. That is merely the prequel.

When the actual attack hits, it feels like the moment someone jumps out and scares you in a haunted house, except it lasts for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time — words flying through my head unattached to any meaning, limbs tingling as if blood supply has slowed to a drip. Worst of all, my breath drops out like I’ve suddenly leapt to a great altitude, and a little voice pipes up telling me that this is it, my brain is about to tip into insanity, forever unable to return to normal. Right now, as coughs around the world are observed with quiet uncertainty (Cold or Covid-19? Flu or the first signs of worse?), panic attacks are menaces in their own right, leaving sufferers to wonder how, exactly, their unreliable physiology is failing them.

My first panic attacks happened at 21, after I had smoked some formidable weed. But it was later that they came on me in unrelenting waves, after I resigned from an imploding magazine in 2014 (while on my honeymoon in the Namibian desert, no less) and then found myself idle at home, stuck inside long empty days, lonely for the colleagues with whom I’d spent years establishing my bona fides as a book critic. These attacks reduced me to an inert little mouse, so fearful that I once slathered my legs in layer after layer of alcohol after dipping my toes into a creek — what if, my mind asked in an undying chant, that water is home to a flesh-eating bacteria? Now, tucked away in our house for all but the essential trips outside, days are starting to take on the same tenor.

Five years ago, at my therapist’s urging, I kept track of every panic attack that washed over me: my record for a single day was 132. Soon I was diagnosed with agoraphobia and panic disorder, which is essentially a preoccupation with recurring panic attacks. An uptick in my SSRIs was the first wave of combat infantry, backed up by close work with the therapist. But it was a grey, mass-market paperback called “Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” with a front-cover blurb from Ann Landers, that became my talisman. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: A book critic shouldn’t fall for that.

Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass. That’s the recipe that Dr. Claire Weekes, the Australian clinician and relatively underrecognized pioneer of modern anxiety treatment, established in a series of books (including “Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” her first) published from 1962 to 1989, the year before she died. This advice, when you encounter it in the midst of a cycle of breath-shortening attacks, may sound cruel.

First, Weekes says, you must decide to truly experience the panic, to let it burst out into your fingers, your gut, your skull. Then, sink into it like a warm pool. Finally, rather than mentally kicking your legs to keep your nose out of the water, flip onto your back. “Stop holding tensely onto yourself,” she writes, “trying to control your fear, trying ‘to do something about it’ while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis.” Just float through it, observing that it’s happening and recognizing that it will end.

Weekes promises that “every unwelcome sensation can be banished, and you can regain peace of mind and body.” That’s a guarantee that, even in our cure-all-saturated world (Sex dust for orgasms! Crystals for … everything!), is hard to square. But her advice, hard-earned through her own lifelong anxiety, which would wake her out of sleep to torment her, is so simple that “Hope and Help” essentially turns into a soothing repetition of two points. First, that what we’re mostly afraid of is fear. And second, that “by your own anxiety you are producing the very feelings you dislike so much.” Page after page offers the reassuring reminder that you can best fight your panic by refusing to fight the panic.

And in short: It works.

Weekes’s tactics have trickled out in drabs to influence much of cognitive behavioral therapy’s approach to panic. She was no lightweight — first an evolutionary biologist, then a general practitioner and made a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1973. Psychiatrists poo-pooed her theories in her day — her biographer Judith Hoare writes that as the guest speaker at a prominent psychotherapy conference in 1977, fellow doctors belittled her lack of formal training and “looked at their watches and talked among themselves” — but her work was propelled by word of mouth (“Hope and Help” had sold more than 400,000 copies by 1978), and a cultish devotion to her simple and direct advice means that today the book is prized by the readers, including me, whom it has guided out of emotional suffocation. A scroll through its Amazon reviews turns up one gushing convert after another.

The language of self-help, especially of the mental health variety, often emphasizes resilience and grit, like we’re mixed martial artists who ought to stand firm after every wallop. (“Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks!,” exclamation point included, is one of the sponsored books Amazon shows above Weekes’s books.) But “Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” which walks us through every possible physical symptom of panic — from “giddinesss” to “sore scalp” — sounds practically Victorian to our modern ears, in both its lingo and its prescription. Weekes refers to panic as “nervous illness,” and illustrates it with images like the shaking hands of a vicar’s wife as she struggles with “cups of tea rattling in their saucers.”

Perhaps it was that strange step back in time that turned me into a Claire Weekes acolyte — I could imagine her walking in to soothe the “hysterical” captive of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” and pull her back out of the walls. I started recommending the book to friends who admitted to their own secret panic. I kept it at hand for hourly reminders that I needn’t activate some dormant intrepid fighter inside me who could claw my brain back to stability like a member of Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic crew.

Stuck inside again these days, I’ve been paging through “Hope and Help,” rereading the portions I underlined five years ago, when my fingers dulled the ink’s crispness with their fervor. If this book is my amulet, it isn’t the only one — for one angsty year, I carried Fernando Pessoa everywhere; and though I’m an atheist, I travel with my grandmother’s novena book as if its pages could flap hard enough to keep a plane aloft. But Weekes’s work has the particular effect of pushing me to see that something lies beyond the moments of slip-sliding terror I find myself in every few hours, or minutes.

This isn’t how book critics behave, or so I’ve been led to believe. Books are supposed to meet higher standards than just the emotional release they incite. Which is true. But they can also be ballast, and in a time like this I refuse to cede an essential value of books just to maintain some irrelevant dedication to an intellectual credo.

Especially since this one has potent advice for the present moment, when many of us feel we must push back our disquiet more tenaciously than ever. If you’re afraid, then be afraid. You might float through to the other side.