Published 11 September 2025.
Summary
The 10 Year Health Plan for England: fit for the future outlines mental health as an early priority.
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
From April to June 2025:
There were 23 million antidepressant items prescribed to an estimated 7 million identified patients.
The number of hypnotics and anxiolytics items increased by less than 1% to 3.3 million, and the number of identified patients decreased by nearly 2% to 1 million.
The number of items prescribed of drugs used in psychoses and related disorders was 3.5 million, an increase of 2%. There were 661,000 identified patients, a decrease of less than 1%.
For CNS stimulants and drugs for ADHD, the number of items increased by 6% to 965,000. There was a 7% increase in identified patients, to 284,000.
Drugs for dementia items increased by 3% to 1.2 million, and the number of identified patients increased by 1% to 277,000.
Prescribing costs increased for 3 out of the 5 drug groups when compared to the previous quarter:
- CNS stimulants and drugs for ADHD had the largest change in costs, increasing by nearly 5%, a lower percentage increase than for both items and patients.
- The cost of drugs used in psychoses and related disorders saw an increase of over 2%, a larger percentage increase than for items in this drug group.
- Drugs for dementia also had an increase in costs of just over 1%, a lower percentage increase than for items.
- Costs decreased by 1% for hypnotics and anxiolytics and 0.5% for antidepressants, despite small increases in items for both drug groups.
Resource list
Medicines used in Mental Health - Quarterly summary narrative April to June 2025 (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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Responsible statistician: Kate Abel