2. Personality disorders
Approximately 9% of the population exhibits some form of personality disorder, which, like mood disorders, comes in three common diagnoses: antisocial personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.
Antisocial personality disorder is diagnosed in about 1% of the population and is characterized by a person’s unwillingness to follow social rules and cultural norms. Most people with this disorder are unable to differentiate between right and wrong and show little remorse for their actions. Antisocial personality disorder is incredibly difficult to treat, because there isn’t a drug specifically designed to deal with it, nor do all people who have it recognize they have a problem that needs treating. Commonly, a combination of counseling and medication, which can range from antipsychotics to antidepressants, is used.
Avoidant personality disorder is a lifelong health condition that affects more than 5% of the population and is characterized by a person’s feeling of being shy, inadequate, and sensitive to what others have to say about them. The most commonly prescribed medication here would be generic forms of Eli Lilly & Co. (NYSE:LLY)’s Prozac. Like many mood disorders, antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications work well to counter the social phobias often exhibited by people with this disorder, but few new medications have been developed. Again, that’s a big win for generic-drug makers and the consumers, but also a disappointment in that no new meds are hitting the market.
The third common personality disorder is borderline personality disorder, or BPD, which affects about 1.6% of the U.S. population. People with this disease are often emotionally unstable and impulsive in nature. They also tend to have trouble carrying on interpersonal relationships with others. While BPD is often inherent at birth, patients can undergo a mixture of talk therapy and drugs to help alleviate symptoms. In the drug department, this could include any combination of anti-psychotics, antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and mood stabilizers. One of the most effective anti-psychotics in this space has been Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE:BMY) and Otsuka Holdings Co Ltd (TYO:4578)‘ Abilify, which is used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. U.S. net sales of the drug topped $4.2 billion last year, and net sales in the first quarter added 10% compared with the year-ago period.
3. Eating disorders
The third most-commonly diagnosed mental disorder is eating disorders, which (not to sound like a broken record) fall into three primary categories: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. Women are three times as likely as men to develop anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa in their lifetime and 75% more likely to be diagnosed with binge-eating disorder than men, according to the NIMH.
Of the mental disorders we’ve discussed here, perhaps none benefits the least from a medication perspective than anorexia nervosa, a condition characterized by being chronically underweight and malnourished. Because of the serious effects being malnourished can have on the body, hospitalization may be required to stabilize normal body functions, but long-term treatment involving individual, group, and family therapy is often the remedy. If any drugs do tend to be prescribed, it tends to be an antidepressant such as Prozac.
In bulimia nervosa, better known simply as bulimia, patients tend to eat, or in some cases binge-eat, and then purge the food from their bodies before they’ve had a chance to absorb the proper amount of nutrients. Others may choose a non-purging method such as fasting to ensure no weight gain. Either method tends to leave bulimic patients as anorexic and malnourished, which can lead to life-threatening health issues. Here again, medication is rarely as helpful as talk therapy in treating the disease. The only FDA-approved therapy to treat bulimia nervosa is Eli Lilly & Co. (NYSE:LLY)’s antidepressant Prozac, but even that won’t have much effect without a heavy dose of individual, group, and family support.
Source: Sylvar, Flickr.
The third eating disorder is binge-eating disorder, which is characterized by regularly consuming large quantities of food, which often results in excessive weight gain. Even the people who recognize these urges are wrong can’t stop themselves from overeating. As with the other eating disorders, talk therapy is an important aspect of treatment, but medication can also play a crucial role. Antidepressants are a commonly prescribed tool used to improve a patient’s mind-set, but I could see chronic weight-management drugs such as Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ARNA)‘ Belviq and VIVUS, Inc. (NASDAQ:VVUS)‘ Qsymia potentially playing a role in treating binge-eating disorders in the future.
With binge-eating patients often not in the best mental state, Belviq and Qsymia in combination with an antidepressant could help shed some initial weight for patients who are clinically considered obese. Simply losing a few percentage points of body weight could be enough to completely change that person’s state of mind and turn his or her life around. With Belviq presenting the better safety profile in trials and Qsymia boasting the more sizable weight loss, both drugs could have an honest shot at being weight-control blockbusters.
Foolish roundup
Although they often fly under the radar, mental disorders affect a big enough subset of our population that researchers should be spending more time coming up with treatments to treat these diseases. Until such time as we see research in this area spike, the aforementioned companies have relatively unopposed revenue streams and, as such, could make for an intriguing investment opportunity.
The article The 3 Most Commonly Diagnosed Mental Disorders originally appeared on Fool.com is written by Sean Williams.
Fool contributor Sean Williams has no material interest in any companies mentioned in this article. You can follow him on CAPS under the screen name TMFUltraLong, track every pick he makes under the screen name TrackUltraLong, and check him out on Twitter, where he goes by the handle @TMFUltraLong.The Motley Fool owns shares of, and recommends, Johnson & Johnson.
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