During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared the increasing prevalence of mental health disorders in children and adolescents a national emergency. One way to understand the magnitude of the problem is to look at trends in rates of antidepressant prescriptions from 2016 to 2022, as Chua et al. have done in a study being early released this month in Pediatrics (10.1542/peds.2023-064245).
The authors report on more than 221 million antidepressant prescriptions for teenagers 12–17 and young adults 18–25 years of age during the 7-year study period using a national all-payer database. Overall, the monthly antidepressant prescription rate in youth increased 66.3%. With the onset of COVID-19 from 2020 through 2022, the dispensing rate had a 63.5% increase compared to the pre-pandemic dispensing rate between 2016 and 2019. Antidepressant prescriptions for adolescent females increased 129.6% between 2020 and 2022 compared to 2016 to 2019, and there was a 56.6% increase in prescriptions for young adult females. Results for males were quite different with a decrease in prescriptions dispensed among teen males during and after the pandemic compared to 2016 to 2019 and virtually no change in antidepressants ordered for young adult males 18–25 years of age.
So, why was there an increase in antidepressant prescription rates for adolescent and young adult females but not adolescent and young adult males? We invited a commentary by Dr. Arwa Nasir from the University of Nebraska and Dr. Laeth Nasir from Creighton University (10.1542/peds.2023-064677). Both the commentary and study authors believe this might be due in part to differences in care seeking, differences in recognition, differences in access to care, or differences in treatment patterns. It would be sad if you didn’t link to both the study and commentary so you can reflect on how the interesting findings compare to what you are experiencing with youth being treated with antidepressants in your practice.
