Published 5 December 2024.
Summary
Mental health is a key area of the NHS Long Term Plan published in 2019.
This publication aims to describe the prescribing of medicines used to improve mental health in England that are subsequently dispensed in the community. This publication does not include data on medicines used in secondary care, prisons, or issued by a private prescriber.
The Medicines Used in Mental Health publication is an official statistics release.
Key findings
Between July and September 2024:
There were 23 million antidepressant items prescribed to an estimated 6.9 million identified patients. This was a 1.4% increase in items and a less than 1% increase in identified patients compared to the previous quarter.
The number of hypnotics and anxiolytics items increased by less than 1% to 3.4 million. Identified patients also increased by less than 1% to 1 million.
For drugs used in psychoses and related disorders, the number of items prescribed was 3.5 million, an increase of 2.1%. There were 657,000 identified patients, a smaller increase of less than 0.1%.
For CNS stimulants and drugs for ADHD, the number of items increased by 1.3% to 806,000. There was a less than 1% increase in identified patients, to 234,000.
Drugs for dementia items increased by 3.2% to 1.2 million. Identified patients increased by 1.8% to 268,000.
Most of the 5 drug groups in the publication had larger percentage changes in costs than for items or patients. The exception was drugs for dementia where the increase in costs was less than 1%. Antipsychotics had the largest percentage change in costs out of the drug groups, an increase of 17%. The only drug group where costs decreased was hypnotics and anxiolytics, which fell by 8.9% despite small increases in items and patients.
Resource list
Medicines Used in Mental Health - Quarterly summary narrative July to September 2024 (HTML)Background information and methodology note (HTML)
Medicines Used in Mental Health - Quarterly - Prescribing during the COVID-19 pandemic July to September 2024 (HTML)Pre-release access list (HTML)
This publication has been produced using a reproducible analytical pipeline (RAP) as part of our commitment to transparency and open code. You can view the code used in this RAP on our Medicines Used in Mental Health GitHub repository.
Changes to these statistics
For this release, we’ve updated the National Statistics Postcode Lookup (NSPL) we use to a newer edition. More details can be found in the background and methodology document.
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Contact us
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Responsible statistician: Grace Libby