Published 6 March 2025.
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 October to December 2024:
There were 24 million antidepressant items prescribed to an estimated 7 million identified patients.
The number of hypnotics and anxiolytics items increased by 1.4% to 3.4 million, and identified patients increased by 1.0% to 1.0 million.
The number of items prescribed of drugs used in psychoses and related disorders was 3.5 million, an increase of less than 1%. There were 664,000 identified patients, an increase of 1.1%.
For CNS stimulants and drugs for ADHD, the number of items increased by 8.0% to 870,000. There was a 6.1% increase in identified patients, to 248,000.
Drugs for dementia items increased by 2.0% to 1.2 million, and identified patients increased by 1.8% to 273,000.
Most of the 5 drug groups in the publication had larger percentage changes in costs than for items or patients:
- CNS stimulants and drugs for ADHD were the exception as costs for this group increased by 7.9%, a slightly lower percentage increase than for patients.
- Drugs for dementia had an increase in costs of 15%, the largest percentage change in costs out of the drug groups.
- Costs decreased by 6.4% for antidepressants and 6.5% for antipsychotics, despite small increases in items and patients for both of these drug groups.
Resource list
Medicines used in Mental Health - Quarterly summary narrative October to December 2024 (HTML)
Background information and methodology note (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.
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Contact us
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Responsible statistician: Grace Libby