About one in six American adults reported taking at least one psychiatric drug, usually an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medication, and most had been doing so for a year or more, according to a new analysis. The report is based on 2013 government survey data on some 37,421 adults and provides the finest-grained snapshot of prescription drug use for psychological and sleep problems to date.

“I follow this area, so I knew the numbers would be high,” said Thomas J. Moore, a researcher at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Va., and the lead author of the analysis, which was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. “But in some populations, the rates are extraordinary.”

Mr. Moore and his co-author, Donald R. Mattison of Risk Sciences International in Ottawa, combed household survey and insurance data compiled by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. They found that one in five women had reported filling at least one prescription that year — about two times the number of men who had — and that whites were about twice as likely to have done so than blacks or Hispanics.

Nearly 85 percent of those who had gotten at least one drug had filled multiple prescriptions for that drug over the course of the year studied, which the authors considered long-term use. “To discover that eight in 10 adults who have taken psychiatric drugs are using them long term raises safety concerns, given that there’s reason to believe some of this continued use is due to dependence and withdrawal symptoms,” Mr. Moore said.