Helen Jean Brew MBE (née Butler; 22 November 1922 – 12 January 2013) was a New Zealand actor, birth campaigner, documentary filmmaker, educator and speech therapist for children.
Brew taught pregnant women informal antenatal classes and she travelled to China, Israel, Europe and Tibet during her career.
Brew became interested in the Indian spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti's teachings, became influenced by the psychologist Maurice Bevan-Brown and alternative medical practices.
[1] She was an amateur actor in productions by the Canterbury Repertory Theatre and worked in Napier for 18 months as a speech therapist in the education department.
Brew's experiences of childbirth in hospital which saw her not receive much information of care and kindness during labour combined with her previous work with children who had difficulty with their speech led her to become interested in psychology.
[1] In 1952, Brew and Christine Cole Catley co-established the Natural Childbirth Group in Wellington, which subsequently became Parents Centres New Zealand.
Brew presented a paper to the inaugural New Zealand Early Childhood Care and Development Convention in 1975, which reported the group's aspirations were now Ministry of Health policy.
[1] Between 1972 and 1974, Brew travelled on a partial McKenzie Education Foundation grant to Europe and Israel, meeting and interviewing several key early childhood and psychiatric figures such as the psychiatrist R. D. Laing.
[2] She intended to show that people in Western civilisation had become disconnected from family and spiritualism and hoped to influence humanity to "close the gap between the cultures of East and West, shedding light on the problems of our violent and disordered world, uplifting the inner spirit of mankind.