Anxiety scams are abound on the internet, with promises of quick cures for panic attacks, phobias, and other anxiety problems. When you’re feeling desperate and when your daily life has been disrupted so much by chronic anxiety, it’s very tempting to go online and buy the next product you see. Maybe it will help, but there’s a good chance that you won’t get the promised results. The worst result then isn’t even the money you spent, it’s that you become less hopeful about ever solving the problem. So it’s important to choose your self help tools carefully, and not just grab the first promise you see. Claire Weekes offered hope and help and I would recommend any of her books as a starter in your recovery. Claire Weekes was a pioneer in nervous illness and she will definitely give you a solid foundation from which you can grow in recovery.
Anxiety scams promise quick, easy results. They claim that the great majority of people who use it are “cured” of their anxiety. They suggest that the creators of the product have some special secret or insight which contains great power to help you, something that no one else has thought of. They often offer statistics which can’t be verified, and testimonials from people who can’t be located. Anxiety disorders are solvable problems, and most people who struggle with them can overcome them. But recovery does take some work. If the promise sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
The internet is full of programs created by people with no professional training in health care, psychology, or any relevant field. They’re generally people whose skills are in marketing and advertising. They often try to turn this to their advantage by pointing out that many physicians and therapists don’t know very much about anxiety disorders. This is unfortunately true, but it doesn’t mean that the answer is to turn to internet marketing moguls. The answer is to find better sources of professionally trained help, and materials written by people with experience, training and background to be helpful to you. A good approach to finding a useful book is to go to amazon.com and search for books about the problem you’re facing. Read about the author, read the reviews, and you can often read a sample of the work itself. The odds of getting useful help from books you find that way are much, much higher than just googling the topic.
On the internet, anxiety scams are usually marketed and sold through “affiliate programs”. In an affiliate program, people with products to sell offer others the chance to sell the product through their own website and keep a commission, typically 50-75% of the sale price. It’s quick, easy, and cheap to set up, and affiliates can make some money with little effort. Nobody has anything to lose…except the buyers. This is why you’ll see hundreds of websites for these products. This marketing has become so organized that there’s even a market for buying and selling the articles that affiliates use to promote these products. Affiliates themselves often don’t know much about the product, and pay freelance writers to do the writing for them.
Most of the best self help books for anxiety disorders sell for less than £15.00. Anxiety products on the internet are typically priced far higher than that, even though they’re often only digital files which cost nothing to reproduce. These products usually range in cost from £50 to £150. The prices vary because they often offer a “special low price that expires today!” You can buy a small shelf of books by Claire Weekes for less than what you would pay for one anxiety scam. When the price seems really inflated, odds are it’s an anxiety scam.