Mental health is health! Just like a physical disorder, mental health needs to be effectively treated and when it does, your whole body benefits from it, but when it isn’t addressed, you pay the price! And here’s the research to prove it!

Did you know that unaddressed disorders have the ability not just to impact your mental health but also your overall health, longevity, financial stability, and chances for addiction or substance use. The problem isn’t necessarily the disorder but how we do or don’t respond to it.  Anxiety, depression, OCD, and other disorders don’t have to be a life sentence, but they will negatively impact you if you don’t manage it and here’s the proof!

• Chronic anxiety is associated with a 52% increase in incidents of cardiovascular disease. And another meta-analysis of 46 studies found that anxiety is associated with a 41% higher risk of cardiovascular deaths and heart disease (Batelaan et al., 2016; Roest et al., 2010). 
• 50-60% of patients with anxiety experience depressive symptoms (Kessler et al., n.d.).
• Anxiety and depression significantly reduce workplace productivity and increase absenteeism and presenteeism (de Oliveira et al., 2022).
• ​Approximately $1 trillion per year in lost productivity worldwide due to anxiety and depression.​ These conditions lead to about 12 billion lost workdays each year globally (World Health Organization, n.d.).​
• ​Aproximately 65% of adults and 90% of children with OCD report impairment in major life areas such as work, school, or relationships (International OCD Foundation, 2025).

Why Simplify Life Counseling Is Different

Going to therapy is a wonderful first step to treating mental health issues, but it is important to make sure the therapy you are going to is done by a trained specialist so you can get the most effective outcomes. Did you know that many disorders are misdiagnosed, and many clinicians aren’t working at the proper level of care?

• Major depressive disorder: approx. 65.9% misdiagnosis or nondetection in some primary care samples
• Generalized anxiety disorder: about 71% misdiagnosis/nondetection in primary care settings
• Panic disorder: up to 85.8% misdiagnosed or missed in primary care samples
• Social Anxiety Disorder: 
  • Only 20–25% of people with Social Anxiety Disorder ever receive a correct diagnosis or treatment (Stein & Stein, 2008).
  • 60–80% of individuals with social anxiety go untreated or undiagnosed
  • Average delay before diagnosis or treatment: ~10 years (National Institute of Mental Health, n.d.; Kessler et al., 2005).
• OCD:
  • 50% of OCD cases are initially misdiagnosed by physicians or mental health providers (International OCD Foundation, n.d.).
  • Only 26% of people with OCD receive the correct diagnosis at their first mental health evaluation (Glazier et al., 2015).
  • Average delay to correct OCD diagnosis: 11–17 years (International OCD Foundation, n.d.; Ruscio et al., 2010).

We are here to change these statistics, and as professionals in our field, that is what makes us different.

Why Proper Assessment Matters

Just like with a physical health condition, your mental health needs to be properly assessed. In order to know you have heart disease, cardiologists give patients multiple tests to specify the issues and target the symptoms. If every other health field offers this, mental health should as well because mental health is health. Clinical terms are often being tossed around in social settings, on social media by uninformed and uneducated influencers, etc, terms like anxiety, OCD, depression, and panic disorders. In our culture, misinformation is rampant, and this is why it’s important to have trained, data-informed care to offer the highest level of effective treatment. 

Unfortunately, most clinicians aren’t even assessing or giving a formal screener to identify if clients even meet the criteria for a specific diagnosis.

• Only 13.9% of master’s-level practitioners use routine assessments to measure symptoms and outcomes
• As few as 12% of psychologists and 18% of psychiatrists use standard outcomes in practice at all.
• These numbers are unacceptable to us. People deserve accurate diagnoses and treatment that actually works.

Not having these measures in therapy on an ongoing basis means the majority of therapists are using subjective judgments rather than structured treatment tracking, higher rates of misdiagnosis, ineffective treatment plans, slower improvements, and an inability to measure progress.

Would you want a cardiologist to perform heart surgery on your heart before assessing the need and running tests?

Your brain is just as important.  This is why the effectiveness of your diagnosis, treatment plan, and time in therapy MUST be driven by measurement-based care.

What Makes Simplify Life Different

This is what makes us different! We monitor symptom changes over time, offer ongoing evaluations of the effectiveness of treatment, and adjust tools and strategies that will be most effective in treatment. We offer the most objective feedback for clients and their families (when working with minors).

At Simplify, your experience will be different from going to other therapists because the process is specialized and data-driven. Our primary goal is to help you in the most efficient and effective way. We don’t plan to have you in therapy for a lifetime. Our goal is simple: when we are doing a good job, we are out of a job! We want to give you the tools and skills you need to use outside the therapy office and into your everyday life. 

Begin Your Journey

If you are tired of feeling anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed by your emotions. If you are tired of endless therapy, having none or vague direction, and wondering if therapy is even helping, we’d love to help you.

Simplify Life is here to help you identify your diagnosis and not be defined by it, but empowered by it. We help you actively reduce symptoms, increase your confidence level, and help you have relationships and the life you want most.

Reach out to us today to help you begin your journey.