Tina Mansukhani Garg

Anxiety is the most common mental health condition globally. It’s estimated that 4% to 5% of people in the world have an anxiety disorder at any given time. Long-term surveys in the United States suggest that around one-third of people experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. That means most of us will either struggle with anxiety ourselves or know someone close who has or will. Many of you have probably seen the huge impact anxiety can have on people’s everyday lives, and how life-changing it can be to have effective treatments that alleviate symptoms. In a new article, we examine the history of pharmacological treatments (that is, drugs) used to treat anxiety since the 1950s. These changed a lot in the five decades until the early 2000s, but there have been no new anxiety medications approved since 2004. While there has been a slowdown in the number of new drugs approved for anxiety (which is the focus of our article), the usage and number of prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications have likely continued to increase in recent decades. It can be hard to get concrete and consistent data on this because many of the most recent drugs are primarily antidepressants; so even when prescription figures are available, it’s usually not clear whether they are being used to tackle depression or anxiety. In some cases, it can be both. Even in just the last few years, there have been noticeable increases in the percentage of American adults receiving mental health treatment, which includes taking medications.