How have treatments evolved over the last 70 years?

Anxiety affects hundreds of millions of people every year. What treatments are available, and how have they changed over time?

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.

There is often poor data on the prevalence of mental health conditions, especially in lower-income countries. Even in rich countries, these figures might be an undercount due to the stigma that many feel in admitting they struggle with mental health. That means most of us will either struggle with anxiety ourselves or know someone close who has or will. This is also true for the two of us, and seeing how big an impact it can have on people’s everyday lives, we know that having effective treatments that alleviate or at least reduce symptoms can be life-changing.

In this article, we examine the history of pharmacological treatments — specifically, drugs — used to treat anxiety since the 1950s. These have 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 this 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, as we’ll see, 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.

A 50-year history of anxiety medications in the United States

Tranquilizers

The benzodiazepine revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s

The use of antidepressants since the 1990s

Innovation in anxiety treatments has not stopped, but it has slowed

...read more at ourworldindata.org