MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS: The trend is inevitable given modern lifestyles, but young people tend to seek medical help more than older people, an official saidBy Wu Liang-yi and Liu Tzu-hsuan / Staff reporter, with staff writer
The number of people under the age of 30 in Taiwan taking antidepressants increased 16.1 percent in 2020 from a year earlier, the National Health Insurance 2020 Gender Statistical Report found.
The number of people taking antidepressants has been increasing since 2011, and reached 1,468,716 in 2020, up 5.1 percent from 2019, said the report, which was released in May.
The number of women using antidepressants always far exceeds that of men, it said.
The growth rate stabilized after 2017, but a year-on-year increase in people taking antidepressants can be seen in all age groups, especially those under the age of 30, it
Having to spend the Lunar New Year holiday under isolation or quarantine might cause people to become mentally unstable, doctors have said, offering advice on how to feel more at ease.
Worries that one might test positive for COVID-19 during quarantine, or anxiety over the the unknown, can lead to a high level of mental stress, said Hsu Cheng-dien (許正典), a doctor in Taiwan Adventist Hospital’s Department of Physical and Mental Medicine.
Being deprived of company at a time when most Taiwanese celebrate with family might make the situation especially difficult to endure, especially for those who have been ordered to quarantine
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on people’s mental health, with psychiatric visits up more than 10 percent from two years ago, National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) data show.
About 1.3 million people visited a psychiatrist or psychologist in the first nine months of the year, up 3.2 percent from 1.26 million during the same period last year.
The change was even more pronounced when compared with 2019, when 1.18 million people visited a psychiatrist a 10.2 percent increase.
March was the busiest for mental health clinics with visits from nearly 804,000 people, while June at the height of a