Can Anxiety Kill Your Ability to Love? -

By Daniel Smith, CNN, August 23, 2012

Editor’s note: Daniel Smith is the author of “Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety” (Simon & Schuster, 2012), a New York Times bestseller. He has written for The Atlantic, New York and the New York Times among other publications. He holds the Critchlow Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle. Follow him on Twitter:@monkeyminder

(CNN) — Anxiety disorders cost the United States more than $42 billion a year, nearly one-third of the total “economic burden” of mental illness in this country.

When I came across this figure recently, I had no doubt that it represented a real and serious problem. I have struggled with anxiety for almost 20 years, and when I look back at all the afternoons I’ve spent paralyzed by the disorder — ruminating over things beyond my control, crippled by concerns, waiting out a panic beneath the covers — I see months upon months of diminished productivity and income.

And yet, at the same time, something in me bristled at the effort to articulate the ravages of anxiety in financial terms. Statistics are useful in coaxing policymakers to spend more on psychiatric research, treatment and (one fervently hopes) prevention. But no running of the numbers will ever reflect the truly tragic burden of anxiety, which plays out not in the realm of work but in the realm of relationships. More than anything else, what anxiety costs sufferers is the ability to love.