The potential utility of this approach to prevention would depend both on the safety, cost, and effectiveness of reducing neuroticism and on the extent to which reducing neuroticism actually resulted in reductions in the adverse health and mental health outcomes associated with neuroticism, all of which are currently unknown. The utility of such large-scale preventive interventions would depend partly on whether reducing neuroticism requires interventions more like supplementing drinking water with fluoride to prevent dental carries than like long-term individual psychotherapy. Assuming for the sake of argument that they were effective in reducing neuroticism, encouraging people with high neuroticism scores to use inexpensive interventions with few adverse side effects such as participation in moderate physical exercise (Koukouvou et al., 2004) or taking omega-3 dietary supplements (Conklin et al., 2007) might be cost-effective, even if they yielded only modest reductions in each of the many adverse outcomes associated with neuroticism. More expensive interventions would need to produce larger decreases in physical and mental disorders to be cost-effective. Although much remains to be learned, prescription medication might provide a way to reduce
