You probably know someone who has struggled with low mood or anxious thoughts.
Most of us assume reaching out for help today is easier than it used to be. New research complicates that picture.
Adults with a common mental disorder are now less likely to shake it off within three years than adults were about 12 years ago.
The finding comes from a new analysis in Psychological Medicine by researchers at Amsterdam UMC and the Trimbos Institute in the Netherlands.
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The team compared two large Dutch cohorts of adults, interviewed roughly a decade apart.
In the earlier group, 42.7 percent still had an anxiety, mood or substance use disorder three years later.
In the more recent group, that figure had climbed to 57.9 percent.
Lead author Artemis Gkitakou of Amsterdam UMC and the Trimbos Institute put it plainly to PsyPost.
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"Put simply, around 12 years ago just over 4 in 10 people with a mental disorder experienced a disorder during the following three years, whereas more recently this was almost 6 in 10," she said.
What the study actually measured
NEMESIS is run by the Trimbos Institute, the national center for mental health research in the Netherlands.
Interviewers walk a representative sample of adults through standardized diagnostic questions, then return about three years later.
The earlier wave, NEMESIS-2, ran from November 2007 to July 2012 with baseline and follow-up combined.
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The newer wave, NEMESIS-3, ran from November 2019 to November 2024. The baseline samples included 6,646 adults in NEMESIS-2 and 6,194 in NEMESIS-3.
Anxiety disorders showed the sharpest jump. In the earlier wave, 24.4 percent of adults with anxiety still met the criteria three years later. In the newer wave, that figure was 40.1 percent.
Mood disorders rose from 33.5 to 48.8 percent of adults.
Substance use disorders followed a similar pattern, climbing from 33.7 to 45.5 percent.
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Who was most likely to stay unwell
The researchers also looked at who was most likely to carry a diagnosis forward.
Younger adults, people living in a city, people with childhood trauma, and people with near-daily drug use all stood out.
These patterns were steady across both waves, so they do not explain why recovery has slowed overall.
The drivers may lie outside any single person's history, in broader social, environmental and healthcare forces.
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What it means for people in treatment
The study is based on Dutch data, so the exact numbers may not transfer one for one elsewhere.
The overall direction, mental disorders becoming more chronic over time, lines up with what researchers in several high-income countries have been reporting.
For readers currently in treatment, the findings do not say therapy and medication have stopped working for individuals.
They say that at the population level, more people are still symptomatic three years on than used to be the case.
If symptoms persist after a full course of treatment, the usual advice from clinicians still holds.
Talk to your doctor about adjusting the plan, whether that means a different medication, a different type of therapy, or added support for sleep, substance use or life stressors.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.