Sales of drugs to treat anxiety and other mental health issues have tripled since the pandemic, and grow every year.

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Russians consume more antidepressants every year, topping even pandemic-era levels. Between an endless war against Ukraine, an economic crisis stemming from that conflict and the political repression, the country has registered record sales of the medications every year since the eruption of Covid-19 in 2020. Last year’s total nearly tripled pharmaceutical consumption in 2019, the last year before this ill-fated decade.

Data shared by the Russian consultancy DSM point to an increasingly serious situation. In 2025, the year in which peace negotiations were unsuccessfully reinitiated between Russia, Ukraine and the United States, sales of antidepressants grew 36% compared to 2024.

That adds up to 22.3 million packages every year, for a population of around 143 million. In fact, the war has led to greater dependence on the medications than during the Covid crisis. For comparison, in 2021, just before the offensive against Ukraine began in February 2022, pharmacies sold 9.2 million packages in Russia. During the pandemic, the first major crisis of the decade, that total stood at 7.9 million, a half-million fewer than in 2019, the last “quiet” year.

Last year, the Russian pharmaceutical industry grew to $273 million. Another consultant agency, RNC Pharma, shared a report with the Russian newspaper RBK that pointed to a similar tendency, though it raised the estimation of antidepressants sold to 23.5 million last year.

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It’s possible that war has a larger presence in Russian daily life than the invisible enemy of Covid-19. Independent Russian publication Mediazona and the BBC use public sources to document the names of Russian soldiers who have died since the beginning of the war. According to these numbers, the Russian offensive’s intensification since Trump’s return to power in the United States, by the end of 2025, has led to more than 160,000 dead, though the total is ostensibly “much larger”, due to the number of names that have not been made public. According to estimates, losses have reached 352,000, without counting those who have been wounded and victims of post-traumatic mental health issues.

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“The issue with anti-depressants is that they are sometimes used as a first option when they are not necessary, when there is a different kind of treatment, as in cases of mild to moderate depression,” says Irene de la Vega Rodríguez, a clinical psychologist at the San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid.

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