The pandemic shutdown might have caused a rise in prescription drugs for conditions like A.D.H.D. and depression

See The Age of Distracti-pression: The pandemic’s true toll on mental health won’t be known for a long time, but data from the past two years indicates a rise — some of it sharp — in prescription drugs for conditions like A.D.H.D. and depression by Casey Schwartz for The NY Times. Excerpts:

"First, the broad strokes: In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 15.8 percent of American adults took prescription pills for mental health. During the pandemic, the National Center for Health Statistics teamed up with the Census Bureau to carry out quick online “pulse” surveys and tracked mental health prescription pill use."

The numbers they turned up echo what we already sense: We are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted. What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions."

"Antidepressants continue to be the most commonly prescribed of these medications in the United States, and their use has become only more widespread since the pandemic began, with an 8.7 percent rate of increase from 2019 to 2021, compared with 7.9 percent from 2017 to 2019, according to Express Scripts."

"Since 2017, there has been a 41 percent increase in antidepressant use for the teenagers included in the Express Scripts data (which consists of roughly 19 million people.) For this same 13- to 19-year-old bracket, in the first two years of the pandemic, there was a 17.3 percent change in anxiety medications. It had been a 9.3 percent rate of change between 2017 and 2019."

"Part of the uptick could be explained by the fact that, stuck at home, people finally had time to seek out the health care they had been delaying. But patients seeking help are doing so against a backdrop of isolation, restriction, uncertainty and grief."

"During the pandemic, even as stimulant use among the youngest Americans leveled off slightly, the most recent data from Express Scripts suggests that these pills are being given at ever increasing numbers for young adults. Among Americans ages 20 to 44, numbers of A.D.H.D. medications went up 7 percent from 2017 to 2019, but they increased by 16.7 percent from 2019 to 2021. According to IQVIA, just under 77 million prescriptions were written for A.D.H.D. stimulant medications in 2021, nearly six million more than in 2020. In 2017, that number was 66,612,308.

In some ways it’s easy to understand why, as millions of people are burned out, lethargic and forced to focus all day on computer screens displaying a game board of talking heads with little to no true social connection (to say nothing of exhausted parents stranded with no child care, no school and no help)."