SINGAPORE: Almost one in five are being prescribed antidepressants, psychostimulants and other mental-health-related drugs, with the number of boys being treated for ADHD tripling over the past decade, raising fresh fears about the way medicines are being dispensed to millions of people.
About 10 per cent of boys aged between five and 17 were taking psychostimulants to treat ADHD and drugs known as nootropics in the 2025 financial year, according to the latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare statistics.
In the same year, drugs used to treat ADHD were dispensed to 2.8 per cent of the population, or 761,000 people, in an increase from 2.3 per cent of the population the year before and 0.6 per cent a decade earlier.
The dramatic increase in the number of Australians taking ADHD medication was a contrast to a more measured increase in other mental-health-related prescriptions, which are dominated by antidepressants. About 19 per cent of Australians, or 5.2 million people, were prescribed the drugs in fiscal 2025, compared with 17 per cent in the 2016 fiscal year.
Experts and healthcare professionals are alarmed at the surge in the number of Australians, particularly children, taking ADHD medication. They say the rise of telehealth and an easing of regulations in Queensland and Victoria to allow GPs to diagnose ADHD and prescribe stimulant medications means drugs are too easy to obtain. Previously, only psychiatrists and paediatricians could prescribe the medications.
The AIHW data showed paediatricians and other non-psychiatric specialists wrote 2.6 million prescriptions in the year, which constituted the largest percentage of practitioners prescribing ADHD medications at 37 per cent. This compared with 36 per cent of prescriptions written by psychiatrists and 26 per cent by GPs.
It confirms a broader trend of surging diagnoses and prescribing drugs for ADHD as well as autism, which is contributing to the soaring costs of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and leading to the sharp rise in sickness benefits claims which have alarmed workplaces and life insurers.
Ian Hickie, a leading mental health expert, psychiatrist and former mental health commissioner, said he had concerns about the way drugs were being prescribed, and said Australia was not doing a good enough job on follow-up assessments for patients to determine when they should stop taking the drugs.
“We are talking about widening the prescribing framework against the background where we seem to have a pretty rapid kind of increase. There is a really serious need to look at the quality of prescribing and the impact of it,” said Hickie, who is co-director of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre.
“In Australia, we initiate prescribing, but we don’t track its effectiveness. We start, but we don’t stop or monitor the outcomes.”
The AIHW data, which is sourced from the federal government, showed antidepressants were dispensed to 14 per cent of the Australian population, with more females taking the drugs than males. The use of antipsychotics, anxiolytic and hypnotics and sedatives is declining year-on-year.
Tasmania had the highest patient rates at 25.1 per cent, compared with 17.5 per cent in New South Wales, 18.5 per cent in Victoria, and 20.7 per cent in Queensland.
MPs and doctors have argued the rates of people being diagnosed with ADHD will only accelerate as more Australians access online consultations and more relaxed rules are implemented by the states about who can prescribe ADHD medications.
There is also a debate over who should be allowed to oversee the administration of psychedelic drugs to treat mental health disorders.
Doctors’ groups have opposed a move by the Victorian government to allow patients with an existing ADHD diagnosis to top up prescriptions via an online consultation without seeing a GP or psychiatrist.
Labor MP Mike Freelander, who chairs a parliamentary health committee, has raised concerns about children potentially being prescribed medications they do not always need after undergoing only superficial assessments.
A surge in the number of children being diagnosed with autism who are claiming benefits on the NDIS has forced the Albanese government to propose sweeping cuts to the scheme which costs taxpayers more than $50 billion a year. Other psychosocial disabilities are also expected to be targeted under efforts to rein in the scheme’s growth.
The government needs to slash the number of scheme participants by 160,000 to get the NDIS’ spending growth rate from the current 10 per cent to an average of 2 per cent over the next four years.
Psychiatrists this week told a Senate inquiry into the proposed NDIS cuts that deep reductions in funding would mean people living with severe mental illness will struggle to access disability supports.
“If people lose access to disability supports without equivalent alternatives being available, the pressure does not disappear, it simply shifts,” Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists president Astha Tomar said.
“It shifts to already overstretched emergency departments, public mental health services, homelessness services, families and carers.”
Around 10 to 11 per cent of NDIS participants have psychosocial disability as their primary disability, representing up to 80,000 people nationally, she said.