Most people who are turning to more extreme and DIY solutions are doing so precisely because they've tried everything else. Outside of a small core of "natural cure" quacks, alternative medicine or "unproven medicine" is the last thing people try after conventional medicine and methods of symptom regulation have failed.
Combined, the anxiety treatment options you mentioned are probably about 80-90% effective, which is good from a societal outcomes perspective, but that still leaves millions of people with no other options.
Furthermore, many of the FDA approved medications for anxiety have side effects that can be more harmful than the original anxiety, and patients have far less experience coping with those second-order effects. A sufferer of extreme anxiety can have developed a toolset of partially effective coping mechanisms built over decades of experience, but be totally unprepared to deal with the disassociative effects and suicidal thoughts that come from something like Xanax.
Anecdotal, but the people I know who have messed with brain hacking did not do it to treat anxiety but because they believe it makes them better at learning stuff. Precisely because of the effect described in this letter - they read a couple of studies that sound very positive and think this is something they could easily do at home.
I doubt we can get any real numbers about the motivation behind DIY tDCS. But I'm glad this was written.
I think you're right and for me the numbers skew about 70-30 for people who want an "edge" and people who want a "cure".
Although, (at the risk of being pedantic and playing parlor games) I would say that many of the people seeking to boost their ability to learn and go to such great lengths to do it are also experiencing psychological problems.
Only anecdotal, but it's never been my most successful friends trying to become even moe successful, but rather people who feel like failures or that they're stuck in a rut, or that they're just not cognitively capable of being in this industry at the highest levels on their own.
That coincides with what I have seen, those studies definitely made me and my friends curious. With better evidence I will definitely be trying tDCS for accelerating learning.
Thanks for this. There is a bottle of contingencies in my bathroom, but, it simply is not an option for what plagues me daily. I quickly become wholly inefficient & anxiety transmutes to doldrums. In the days directly after having to succumb to the use of a benzo I am foggy and detached...hungover. Have not tried some of the newer beta-blockers that are supposed to work without creative lobotomy.
Combined, the anxiety treatment options you mentioned are probably about 80-90% effective, which is good from a societal outcomes perspective, but that still leaves millions of people with no other options.
Furthermore, many of the FDA approved medications for anxiety have side effects that can be more harmful than the original anxiety, and patients have far less experience coping with those second-order effects. A sufferer of extreme anxiety can have developed a toolset of partially effective coping mechanisms built over decades of experience, but be totally unprepared to deal with the disassociative effects and suicidal thoughts that come from something like Xanax.