ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2021
Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the General Mental Health in Sweden: No Observed Changes in the Dispensed Amount of Common Psychotropic Medications in the Region of Scania.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on antidepressant use in eleven European regions: a comparative time series analysis 2018-2022.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Article
- Trends in Sedative-Hypnotic Prescription Among Insomnia Patients: A Nationwide Cohort Study From 2010 to 2022 in Korea.Journal of Korean medical science · 2026Article
- Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on antidepressant prescribing with a focus on people with learning disability and autism: an interrupted time series analysis in England using OpenSAFELY-TPP.BMJ mental health · 2025Article
- Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on antidepressant consumption in the Central region of Portugal: interrupted time series.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2025Article
- Association between a publicly funded universal drug program and antipsychotic and antidepressant medication dispensing to children.BMC pediatrics · 2025Article
- The impact of social distancing on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a nationwide study of 4.6 million Danish adults.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2025Article
- Observational
- Utilization of antidepressants, anxiolytics, and hypnotics during the COVID-19 pandemic.Translational psychiatry · 2024Review
- COVID-19-associated mortality in individuals with serious mental disorders in Sweden during the first two years of the pandemic- a population-based register study.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Treatment seeking for gambling disorder in nationwide register data - observations around a major shift in legislation.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Regional clozapine, ECT and lithium usage inversely associated with excess suicide rates in male adolescents.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Drug prescriptions preceding opioid-related deaths-a register study in forensic autopsy patients.PloS one · 2023Observational
- Antidepressants Drug Use during COVID-19 Waves in the Tuscan General Population: An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis.Journal of personalized medicine · 2022Article
- Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the psychotropic drug consumption.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Some first investigations have focused on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for the general mental health after its outbreak in 2020. According to multiple self-reporting surveys, symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression have risen worldwide. Even some studies based on health care records start to be published, providing more objective and statistically reliable results. Additionally, concerns have been raised, to what extend the access to mental health care has been compromised by the COVID-19 outbreak. The aim of this study was to detect changes in prescription trends of common psychotropic medications in the Swedish region of Scania. The monthly dispensed amounts of selected pharmaceuticals were compared from January 2018 until January 2021, regarding the prescription trends before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. Using an interrupted time series analysis for each medication, no general trend changes were observed. On the one hand, a possible deterioration of the general mental health could not be confirmed by these results. On the other hand, the access to mental health care did not seem to be impaired by the pandemic. When interpreting findings related to the COVID-19 pandemic, regional differences and country-specific approaches for coping with the pandemic should be considered. The Swedish population, for instance, never experienced a full "lock-down" and within Sweden the time point of the outbreak waves differed regionally. In general, the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on mental health are still unclear and need to be investigated further in an international comparison.
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