The answers are "sometimes" and "it depends." I'm of the opinion that research dollars should go towards more cost-effective treatments. Therapy appointments a

The answers are "sometimes" and "it depends." I'm of the opinion that research dollars should go towards more cost-effective treatments. Therapy appointments are in general pretty expensive, both in actual cost and in time spent. However, one treatment method I found out about recently seems to tackle both these drawbacks of traditional therapy. That treatment method is called cognitive bias modification. It's based on the premise that anxiety disorders and related mental illnesses are maintained by cognitive biases in the sufferer, attention and interpretation biases specifically, and by changing these biases people who suffer from mental illness can see relief. One way to accomplish changing these biases is by presenting people with stimuli they would normally encounter in their environment and training them to identify positive stimuli, in effect modifying their attention bias towards positive stimuli. If you do a search for cognitive bias modification in your device's app store, you can already find apps that claim to help. The efficacy of these apps is not scientifically established, but it does point to the promise that CBM therapy can be both cost-effective and easily accessible. It might not even be necessary to subsidize people's access to this kind of therapy, but instead to simply subsidize the production of apps that assist with this kind of therapy. Here is a paper explaining the current state of the field (as of Dec 2011): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092585/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092585/