Mental health disorder, psychotropic drug prescription linked to socioeconomic difficulty

Key takeaways:

• Mental health disorders and psychotropic drug prescription were linked to socioeconomic difficulties.
• The findings challenge the stigmatizing false dichotomy of individuals with and without mental illness.

Mental health disorders and psychotropic drug prescriptions are associated with socioeconomic difficulties, according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry.

“This study presents systematic population-based nationwide data on the lifetime incidence of mental health disorder/prescription of psychotropics and the association with patients’ socioeconomic functioning,” Lars Vedel Kessing, DMSc, professor of psychiatry at the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues wrote.

Kessing and colleagues conducted a nationwide population-based study using data from Statistics Denmark, the Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register from 1969 to 2018, the Medicinal Product Statistics from 1995 to 2018 and the Danish Medical Register on Vital Statistics from 1969 to 2018. The study included 462,864 individuals with a median age of 36.6 years who had any mental health disorder. A total of112,641 participants were registered with a hospital-contact mental health disorder diagnosis, and 422,080 were registered with a prescription of psychotropic medication.

The researchers compared socioeconomic factors between patients with a recorded mental health disorder or the prescription of psychotropics versus age- and sex-matched individuals from the general population with no prior mental health disorder or psychotropic prescription.

Kessing and colleagues found an association between mental health disorder or psychotropic prescription and socioeconomic difficulties such as lower income (HR = 1.55; 95% CI, 1.53-1.56), increased unemployment or disability benefit (HR = 2.50; 95% CI, 2.47-2.53), greater likelihood of living alone (HR = 1.78; 95% CI, 1.76-1.80) and being unmarried (HR = 2.02; 95% CI, 2.01-2.04).

“The findings should add to changing our understanding of normalcy and mental illness by challenging the stigmatizing false dichotomy of individuals with [versus] without mental illness,” Kissing and colleagues wrote. “These findings may further prompt rethinking the primary prevention of mental illness and future mental health clinical resources.”