I would argue that taking a drug to cover over something like anxiety is exactly the sort of circumstance that usually ends up with people being addicted/dependant. If I were you, I'd start addressing those root causes ASAP.

How do you know a person you're advising over the Internet hasn't already tried?

How do you know they weren't abused as a child, or a veteran suffering from PTSD, or a rape victim or any other number of things where the root cause is probably never going to be fully resolved, just managed.

There's a tragic amount of hate for doctors in this thread, and I really mean tragic because it's going to result in someone out there not getting the help they need, because they think they and the Internet are smarter than a doctor.

The medical profession has the right answer here, which is that in general for serious psychiatric disorders, you use a combination of drugs and therapy in order to get results. Drugs get you immediate results with a higher degree of reliability. Therapy is less consistent, expensive and slow, but when it works the effects are mostly permanent and side effect-free.

Now does the US system over-prescribe drugs and is it fucked up by cost pressures? The answer is way too often 'yes,' but people are conflating this with "doctors are awful."

There are people who need the drugs now as well as people who will need them forever.

There are also worse fates than addiction.