ALAN MILBURN’s review of the reasons that so many young people are unemployed contains the grim statistic that, in the past ten years, the numbers of non-working young people receiving benefits for a health condition have nearly doubled.
Among these are many with reported anxiety, some of whom rarely leave their homes. It has been suggested that this may go back to Covid lockdowns, when children who should have been at school could not leave the house, and never got into the habit of socialising. Others suggest that addiction to social media is keeping teenagers and twenty-somethings online night and day. Whatever the causes, anxiety in young people is a big issue.
I recently read a biography of the Australian physician Claire Weekes, The Woman who Cracked the Anxiety Code (Scribe UK, 2019), by Judith Hoare. Dr Weekes was a formidable academic, a zoologist and an expert on evolution in lizards, who turned to medicine in her forties and found herself intrigued by the prevalence of crippling anxiety (then often described as “nerves”) in many of her patients. At the time, treatment for anxiety included analysis in the Freudian tradition, electric-shock treatment, extended sedation, or even, horrifically, brain lobotomy.
It was Weekes’s contribution to trace the symptoms of anxiety to the physiology of simple fear, explaining the pounding heart, dizziness, breathlessness, weak knees, and anxious trembling in terms of the effect of fear on the nervous system. The drama that sometimes culminated in breakdown, collapse, or overwhelming helplessness originated in a protective physical response to danger.
In her bestselling book Self-Help for Your Nerves (1962), Weekes explored and explained all this carefully, and guided her readers through a simple routine of desensitisation: not fighting the symptoms, but accepting and observing them, with the mantra “Float, don’t fight.” She knew what she was talking about, having been through a period of anxiety herself when she was a student. I came across her work years ago, when I struggled with “nerves” in the months after my A levels.
Today, the tendency is to treat description as diagnosis; so symptoms are described as “panic disorder”, and “having anxiety” is preferred to “being anxious”, which confirms the view that anxiety should be treated as an illness rather than as a more passing state of mind. Weekes did not dismiss medication — she knew how important it could be in controlling anxiety symptoms — but she refused to over-pathologise the problem, believing that a degree of anxiety was a normal human response to fearful circumstances, and that over-anxious people could recover equilibrium with acceptance and patience.
She was not religious, but her remedy of observation, acceptance, and “floating” is not unlike the “mindfulness” of the Buddhist tradition. Perhaps, alongside work, encouragement, and abandoning the smartphone, the anxious young need to find a form of spirituality to help them to get up and go.
Angela Tilby is interviewed about her new book, Good Faith: Why England needs its Church, on the Church Times podcast. Listen here