How Many Adults Do Psychiatric Drugs? 1 In 6 Americans Take Anti-Anxiety, Other Pills, Study Finds

One in six adults in the U.S. reported taking some kind of psychiatric drug, usually an antidepressant or anti-anxiety pill, during the course of a year, a study published Monday found. Most adults reported taking medication for a year or more.

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Internal Medicine, the study is based on 2013 government survey data and analyzes the responses of 242 million adults.

The study found that 16.7 percent of the 242 million people reported taking psychiatric drugs of which 12 percent said they took antidepressants; 8.3 percent said they took anxiolytics, sedatives, and hypnotics; and 1.6 percent filled out prescriptions for antipsychotics.

“I follow this area, so I knew the numbers would be high,” Thomas J. Moore, the study’s lead author and researcher at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices in Alexandria, Virginia, reportedly said. “But in some populations, the rates are extraordinary.”

With co-author and chief medical officer at Risk Sciences International in Ottawa, Donald R. Mattison, Moore found women were twice as likely to fill at least one prescription in 2013 compared to men. Whites were twice as likely to take psychiatric prescription drugs compared to African-Americans and Hispanics. Less than 5 percent of Asian-Americans reported to taking psychiatric drugs.

They also found that 84.3 percent of those who reported taking medication had filled multiple prescriptions for their drug over the course of the year.

“To discover that eight in 10 adults who have taken psychiatric drugs are using them long term raises safety concerns, given that there’s reason to believe some of this continued use is due to dependence and withdrawal symptoms,” Moore said.

Adults aged between 60 years and 85 years were the highest users of psychiatric drugs. Only 9 percent of adults aged between 18 years and 39 years reported taking drugs, while nearly 18 percent of adults aged between 40 years and 59 years said they filled prescriptions for psychiatric medicine.

The study focused on the number of people taking medication and did not investigate why they used psychiatric drugs.