Doctor Hazel Claire Weekes MBE (11 April 1903 – 2 June 1990) was an Australian general practitioner and health writer; she also had an early career as a research scientist working in the field of comparative reproduction. Doctor Weekes is considered by many as the pioneer of modern anxiety treatment and has written several books on dealing with anxiety disorders. Many of today's self-help books on anxiety continue to cite her work. Weekes found that many of her patients suffered from various anxiety disorders, such as agoraphobia, panic attacks, phobias, generalised anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In her books, she chose to avoid the term "nervous breakdown", as much as possible, as she considered the term vague, unscientific and unnecessarily alarming. Weekes also avoided the term "Anxiety State" as she felt it was too "medical", so she replaced both terms with "Nervous Illness" instead. Weekes was concerned with the severe long-term effects anxiety and panic disorders had on the lives of her patients as well as the high failure of typical psychiatric treatments, especially psychoanalysis, which many sufferers had tried. Instead, Weekes developed her own unique treatment program. She noted that patients did not suffer from anxiety problems because they had flawed personalities or traumatic childhoods; rather, the problems were caused by the patient having a habit of fear-avoidance, made worse, or caused, by a very responsive "sensitized" nervous system. She was critical both of Freudian approaches and of attempts by behaviorists to "desensitize" their patients using relaxation and breathing techniques. Weekes described in her books the three main pitfalls that lead to Nervous Illness. They are sensitization, bewilderment and fear. She explained that so much nervous illness is no more than severe sensitization kept alive by bewilderment and fear. Dr. Weekes analyzed fear as two separate fears; the first fear and the second fear. She explained that first fear is the fear that comes reflexively, almost automatically. The patient usually immediately recoils from it, and as he/she does, he/she adds a second fear to the first. Second fear is the fear the patient adds to the first fear. Examples of second fear are "Oh, my goodness! Here it is again! I can't stand it!". It is the second fear that is keeping the first fear alive, keeping the sufferer sensitized and keeping them nervously ill. Weekes initially used the program on her own patients and then, as word spread