Severe anxiety is painful for sure, but doesn't that seem a bit unnecessary? Given there are proven methods for treating anxiety such as medications, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapies, etc without such a high cost.
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.
I doubt we can get any real numbers about the motivation behind DIY tDCS. But I'm glad this was written.
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.
Some doctors not in the loop will end up overprescribing Xanax and benzodiazepines to deal with the symptoms, but fail to recognize that they're only indicated to be used for a period of 4-6 weeks because they're highly addictive drugs with a withdrawal that can last 6mo or more, can cause brain damage or kill. They mask the symptoms, add their own (you are essentially drunk and impaired while on them) and tend to make the disorder worse after quitting.