Lebanon’s rising dependence on psychiatric medication

Lebanon spent an estimated $17.49 million on psychiatric medications, sedatives, and antidepressants in 2025. More than 2.81 million boxes of these drugs were sold in the span of a single year, figures drawn from pharmaceutical sector sources that represent one of the starkest statistical portraits yet of a society under sustained psychological strain.

A pill for every crisis

Lebanon entered 2025 still carrying the accumulated weight of compounding disasters. The Israel-Hezbollah war added another layer of trauma, displacement, and loss to a population already running on diminishing reserves of resilience.

Against that backdrop, the spike in psychiatric drug consumption is less surprising than it is heartbreaking. Anxiety is not an irrational response to these conditions, it is a rational one. The medication is not the problem. The problem is that medication has become the primary available response, in the absence of anything else.

What the pharmaceutical syndicate confirmed

The Beiruter investigated the surge with Abboudi Merkbawi, head of the Pharmaceutical Syndicate, who confirmed the dramatic rise in orders for sedatives and psychiatric medications. Merkbawi attributed the increase to mounting stress and anxiety directly tied to Lebanon's ongoing war conditions and the broader climate of instability that now defines daily life for a large portion of the population.

He urged some caution in reading the raw sales figures in isolation. Pharmaceutical data captures what moves through formal distribution channels. It does not account for medications shared between households, obtained informally, or sourced through parallel networks, all of which are common in a country where formal systems have partially collapsed. The real scale of consumption, in other words, may be larger than the figures suggest.

The Ministry of Health has no data

When The Beiruter contacted the Ministry of Public Health to request figures on psychiatric medication consumption, officials indicated the Ministry does not collect or maintain this data. There is no tracking mechanism in place, no coordination with pharmaceutical distributors to compile national consumption records, and no published reporting on the mental health dimensions of Lebanon's ongoing crises.

This means that the $17.49 million figure, sourced through pharmaceutical sector channels, exists entirely outside the government's field of vision.

The risk no one wants to name

Behind the headline figure lies a more urgent question: what happens when the medication runs out, or becomes unaffordable?

Lebanon has been here before. During the peak of the subsidy crisis in 2021 and 2022, psychiatric medications were among the drug classes hardest hit by shortages, a fact documented in peer-reviewed research published by PLOS Global Public Health, which found that mood-stabilizing drugs experienced some of the steepest price increases relative to average income of any category tracked.

For patients managing serious conditions, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, sudden discontinuation of medication can be dangerous. Withdrawal from certain psychiatric drugs carries its own clinical risks: seizures, psychotic episodes, acute destabilization. The Lebanese health system, already strained beyond capacity, is structurally ill-equipped to absorb a wave of unmanaged mental health crises.

There is also a longer horizon to reckon with. The full psychological toll of the past several years will not be visible until long after the acute crises have passed. Trauma surfaces slowly. What is being medicated today is, in many cases, only beginning to be felt.

What the numbers cannot tell us

The $17.49 million figure is, at its core, an economic measure of suffering. It tells us how much a nation spent trying to chemically manage an anguish that is political in origin, economic in texture, and deeply human in its expression.

What it cannot tell us, is how many people are going without. The 2.81 million boxes sold represent those with access to a pharmacy, the money to pay out of pocket, and the knowledge to ask for help. They say nothing about those managing alone, turning to unregulated alternatives, or simply enduring in silence.