Juliette Gagliardi
Junior Researcher
Mental health treatment in Italy - statistics & facts
Following the implementation of law number 180, passed in 1978, by the year 2000 all psychiatric hospitals in Italy were closed. Nowadays, psychiatric wards in Italy are located in general hospitals, with approximately 10 beds per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2022, around 777 thousand patients were treated in mental health wards in Italy, with most of them females and aged 45 to 64 years. The number of involuntary mental health treatments in Italy has decreased, with a total of 5,118 cases in 2022, most of which occurred in the region of Sicily. The percentage of patients with a severe mental health diagnosis leaving treatment was 1.2 percent in 2022, most with a diagnosis of depression or personality disorder.
Antidepressant and antipsychotic use and cost
As of 2022, depression and schizophrenia and psychoses were the most common mental health disorders in Italy. The consumption of antidepressants in the country has grown since 2013, reaching a rate of 45.8 daily defined doses (DDD) per 1,000 inhabitants per day in 2022. At that time, the most consumed antidepressant was sertraline, which was also the antidepressant with the lowest average cost in DDD in euros. A similar trend can be observed in the consumption of antipsychotics, for which the consumption rate grew from 8.3 DDD per 1,000 inhabitants per day in 2014, to 10.4 in 2022. Olanzapine was the most commonly used antipsychotic at that time. The average cost of this antipsychotic was also one of the lowest.Psychotropic use among children and teenagers
In 2020, the highest rate of minors who were prescribed psychotropics were between 12 to 17 years and most of them were prescribed antipsychotics, followed by antidepressants and ADHD medications. From 2019 to 2020 there was a significant rise in antipsychotic drug prescriptions among children and teenagers. During this time there was an increase of 17.2 percent in the use of antipsychotics, as well as an increase of 6.4 percent in the use of antidepressants. Among minors, the consumption of different types of psychotropics varies greatly by gender. For example, among users of risperidone, a drug used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, almost 80 percent are males.
