The era of distraction-pressure

If you're wondering which pills and how many of them Americans have relied on to feel better since Covid-19 arrived, the answer, in short, is yes.

"I should have resumed meds earlier in the pandemic than I did did," Leah Bellow-Handelman, 36, said bluntly. Ms. Bellow-Handelman, a nurse who lives in Brooklyn with two young children, has been taking and off Prozac for anxiety since her twenties. Shortly before the pandemic, she had weaned in time for her first pregnancy.

So she wasn't taking anything when the pandemic hit, even though her life was operating in total crisis mode: She worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Urgent Care Center in Manhattan, a cancer hospital. The emergency room is dedicated to current and former cancer patients, and many patients admitted to emergency care had particularly severe cases of Covid and needed oxygen or intubation immediately.

"We just put our heads down and did what we had to do," she said. "We were in such disaster mode on autopilot in the spring, that in the summer, that's when we really realized how intense this spring had been." Ms. Bellow-Handelman also felt isolated; many friends had left town, and of those who remained, some were hesitant to see her because she worked in the health field.

In August 2020, her husband encouraged her to go back to therapy.

After a complicated second birth, she decided she needed more than just talking. Her therapist, she said, "never objected to me going back on the meds, but she was trying to get me to do some mindfulness and meditation — things I just don't do. ."

She turned to Prozac again. Now, she says, "I'm a different person."

The reasons behind the decision to start or resume psychiatric treatment are often not reducible to a simple cause and effect relationship.

"I'm definitely medicated because of Covid, but I'm also medicated because I'm a woman who was a nurse and had babies amidst Covid, and a traumatic birth,” Ms. Bellow-Handelman said.

She is one of millions of Americans who started or restarted psychiatric drugs during the long, dreary race It's hard to know exactly what pills Americans are swallowing these days, as much of this information is private.

But, from the companies that provided data to The New York Times and other existing research, it is possible to begin to build a picture of our medicine cabinets and, by extension, our mental health.

First, the highlights: In 2019, Centers s for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 15.8% of American adults take prescription mental health pills. During the pandemic, the National Center for Health Statistics has partnered with the Census Bureau to conduct rapid online surveys and track the use of prescription mental health pills.

The numbers they appeared echoing what we already feel: we are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted. What's new is this: nearly a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now treated for one or more of these conditions.

Specifically, according to the data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit manager, prescribes prescriptions in three categories of mental health medications – depression, anxiety and A.D.A.H. – have all increased since the start of the pandemic. But they did so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each drug class.

Antidepressants continue to be the most popular drugs. most commonly prescribed in the United States. United States, and their use has only become more widespread since the beginning of the pandemic, with an increase rate of 8.7% from 2019 to 2021, compared to 7.9% from 2017 to 2019, according to Express Scripts .

IQVIA, a global health technology and clinical research company, found that in 2021, a tot...