This question demands both financial answers and human answers. Our country spends billions of dollars per year on the treatment of anxiety, which is the most represented and treated of all mental health problems. Over half of these costs come from the medical treatment of medical problems that stem from anxiety!
This fact confirms what most of us who have worked in primary care settings know as clinical truth: that much of primary care focuses on the treatment of anxiety and anxiety-related disorders, that one in five patients is on a benzodiazepine for anxiety, and that primary care physicians prescribe 80% of the anti-depressant/antianxiety drugs in this country. Factor in the amount of days lost from work or the relative lack of productivity experienced due to anxiety, or the amount of violence, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, drunk driving and related lost limbs and lives, and the actual cost of anxiety to this country is staggering.
None of the financial costs approximate the human costs of anxiety, which are legion and often experienced over the course of a lifetime. Anxiety has a nasty habit of hanging around for a long time, far overstaying its welcome, and keeping people from seeking the appropriate treatment. Think of anyone you know who has suffered the loss of a child; a rape; childhood sexual, physical, or emotional abuse; any military veteran who has seen active combat duty and witnessed a fellow soldier be blown to shreds; or any child who has witnessed her parents’ regularly beating one another.
An individual’s world might never feel safe again because once these events have taken place, they become forever etched in the banks of emotional and anxious memory. Inasmuch as these events color the ability to be intimate with others, to feel integrity within one’s own skin, or to access and actualize the human ability to use freedom of choice, the costs are incalculable.