In the past decade, the number of Americans taking prescription medications for mental health disorders has skyrocketed, as a newly released report from Medco Health reveals that the figure has now risen to more than 20 percent in 2010.
The company’s report surveyed 2.5 million insured Americans and compared the use of antidepressants, antipsychotics, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs and anti-anxiety treatments from 2001 to 2010. In the past decade, the use of medications to treat psychiatric and behavioral disorders increased 22 percent in adults between the ages of 20 and 44; the use of antipsychotic and ADHD medications more than tripled; and the use of anti-anxiety drugs increased by 30 percent.
The data also showed that women utilized prescription drugs at a higher-than-average rate, with one in four women saying they were on some sort of mental health-related drug in the past year. The number of women on ADHD medication is also 2.5 times higher than it was in 2001. And, in the 20 to 44 age category, there has been a 264-percent increase in the number of women prescribed these medications, beating out men as the dominant sex using these drugs for this demographic.
“Over the past decade, there has been a significant uptick in the use of medications to treat a variety of mental health problems; what is not as clear is if more people, especially women, are actually developing psychological disorders that require treatment, or if they are more willing to seek out help and clinicians are better at diagnosing these conditions than they once were,” said Dr. David Muzina, a psychiatrist and national practice leader of the Medco Neuroscience Therapeutic Resource Center. “Women are generally more frequent users of healthcare, but they may also be bearing the emotional brunt of a decade that started with the horror of 9/11 and since has seen several wars and economic turmoil.”
Source: PRNewswire
Heather Rudow is a staff writer for Counseling Today. Email her at hrudow@counseling.org.