ArticleScientific reports2022
Psychotropic drug purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and their relationship with mobility restrictions.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 19 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
- Psychotropic medication consumption before and after onset of COVID-19 pandemic in 91 countries and regions: a time-series analysis.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2025Article
- Utilization of psychotropic drugs in Serbia from 2006 to 2021: Patterns before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Prolonged increase in psychotropic drug use among young women following the COVID-19 pandemic: a French nationwide retrospective study.BMC medicine · 2024Observational
- Utilization of antidepressants, anxiolytics, and hypnotics during the COVID-19 pandemic.Translational psychiatry · 2024Review
- Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Use of Antidepressants by Young Adults in the ASL TO4 Regione Piemonte (Italy).Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Psychotropic consumption before and during COVID-19 in Asturias, Spain.BMC public health · 2023Observational
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent literature on the mental health consequences of social distancing measures has found a substantial increase in self-reported sleep disorders, anxiety and depressive symptoms during lockdown periods. We investigate this issue with data on monthly purchases of psychotropic drugs from the universe of Italian pharmacies during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and find that purchases of mental health-related drugs have increased with respect to 2019. However, the excess volumes do not match the massive increase in anxiety and depressive disorders found in survey-based studies. We also study the interplay between mobility, measured with anonymized mobile phone data, and mental health and report no significant effect of mobility restrictions on antidepressants and anxiolytics purchases during 2020. We provide three potential mechanisms that could drive the discrepancy between self-reported mental health surveys and psychotropic drugs prescription registries: (1) stockpiling practices in the early phases of the pandemic; (2) the adoption of compensatory behavior and (3) unexpressed and unmet needs due to both demand- and supply-side shortages in healthcare services.
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Registered trials
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