The cost of BDD isn’t known, but is certainly high. The economic cost includes medical costs for bodily harm and accidents, the cost of ineffective medical and surgical evaluation and treatment, and the cost of medical and psychiatric hospitalization. It also includes the costs of incomplete education, decreased productivity, lateness, and days lost from work, and the cost of disability payments.Some people with BDD have significant financial problems because of these costs or because they spend so much money on wigs, clothes, makeup or surgery. One woman was more than $10,000 in debt because she’d spent so much money on clothing and wigs. Several other people were more than $20,000 in debt.Richard’s experience illustrates how costly BDD can be. Richard had dropped out of school because he constantly went to the bathroom to check the mirror and couldn’t concentrate on his studies. He tried several jobs, but quit each of them because of his symptoms. He then moved in with his family and went on disability.Richard had made three suicide attempts, usually after looking in the mirror and feeling devastated by what he saw. After each attempt, he was hospitalized. After he overdosed, he had a long stay in an intensive care unit. In the six months before I saw him, he’d been hospitalized four times. Richard had also had three operations on his lips, which were costly and ineffective. Two had such devastating results, in his view, that he had to be psychiatrically hospitalized. “I had to be hospitalized because after the surgery my lips were black and blue and swollen,” he said. “They looked deformed. I went wild, screaming and smashing things. I thought they were worse than ever, and I thought I’d done irreparable damage to myself.”Although Richard had had BDD for only several years, the cost of his illness had been staggering—already well over $100,000. But the greater cost of BDD is the human cost—the severe suffering and pain. Years lost to the illness can’t replaced. One man told me, “It’s crazy because I’ve wasted so much of my life. I grieve for all the years this disorder took from me.”*143\204\8*
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