Data were retrieved from the state of mental health in EU report (EC, 2004).

The figures above show

• Amount of euros spending per inhabitant on antidepressants in 2002
• Number of prescriptions of antidepressants per inhabitant prescribed by physicians in 2002
• Defined daily dose (DDD) per 1,000 inhabitants in 2000.

Pharmaceutical companies provide data on the spending in euros per country and per inhabitants. However, this indicator reflects diverse prices so it does not reflect differences in consumption in countries. In the case of the number of prescriptions of antidepressants per inhabitant prescribed by physicians, the data are based on prescription analysis and one prescription could cover either a short or a long period of care, so they may correspond to rather different number of units. Furthermore, hospital consumption has not been taken into account. The DDD/1000 inhabitants system is supposed to be the standard as it uses total mg of product sold in a country by the standard dosage for a day‘s treatment and reports it per 1,000 inhabitants. Unfortunately the DDD data are not available for all countries. Also, a standard dose for antidepressants is not easy to define since this may be different for individual antidepressants.

A large increased consumption in antidepressants between 2000 and 2002 was observed in Portugal, the UK and Italy.