Treatment uptake
The provision of treatment for mental illness is also increasing. Prescription cost analysis data indicates the number of antidepressant prescriptions has almost doubled over the past decade in England, from 36.0 million in 2008 to 70.9 million in 2019. Prescriptions for drugs used in psychoses and related disorders also increased from 8.1 million in 2008 to 12.1 million in 2020.4
Efforts to reduce the inappropriate prescribing of hypnotics and anxiolytics are working as numbers have steadily declined from a peak in 2011 of 17.1 million prescription items to 15.0 million in 2018.4
Non-medicinal therapy has also increased significantly. The number of people receiving NICE-recommended psychological therapies through the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme has increased from around 435,000 in 2012/13 to over 1 million in 2017/18.1
In 2018-19, of the 1.60 million referrals to talking therapies, 1.09 million started treatment (89.4 per cent within six weeks), with over 580,000 referrals completing treatment. This represents 52.1 per cent of referrals moving to recovery.5
NICE is also working with NHS England “to identify and assess digitally enabled therapies which offer the potential to expand IAPT services”. As at November 2019, NICE had published 14 assessments of digital therapies, with six being suitable for further development or evaluation in practice for IAPT.1,6