Maxime (requested anonymity) for two months) sent his attention sheet to his primary mainness of main evil insurance (CPAM), without response. He suffers from depression after exhaustion, this forty -year -old boy residing in the department of the North, is a victim of the shortage of Quetiapina, a psychotropper subject to a serious shortage for almost a year in France.
He was taking Quetiapin prolonged liberation (LP), but this formula abandoned the pharmacies. Maxime had to try alternative treatments: “They offered me the immediate release formula (LI) in master preparation (preparation made for a certain patient and according to a medical recipe, by a pharmacist, note), but it was very laborious. I did several tests to find the correct dose and nothing went in my life,” he told BFM Business. “I suffered from eating disorders, panic puffs and night terrors,” he reports, tremolos in his voice.
Several quetiapine references available in Belgium
Descended alternatives available in France, this heritage management advisor has resolved to cross the Belgian border to obtain its usual treatment in a pharmacy in Mouscron, about twenty kilometers from Lille. And he is not the only patient in France who appears at the counter of this pharmacy.
In its drawers, this pharmacy has quetiapina boxes marketed by the EG, Teva or Sandoz laboratory. And whatever the formula, immediate or prolonged release.
If quetiapina has become a rare product in France, it is especially because few references are authorized and marketed. “Only prolonged release is authorized, while some patients would better tolerate the immediate release formula that is authorized by other European countries. Why not here?” Ask Michael Sikarov, who is psychiatrist in Laval (Mayenne) and patient with bipolar disorders, also a victim of shortage.
Like Maxime, this doctor decided to buy his treatment in Belgium: “I have enough capsules with immediate release to celebrate a year for 210 euros,” he says. And you will not be able to have a social security impulse, the health insurance that does not reimburse the medicines bought abroad and prescribed in a French recipe if they appear in the list of reimbursable medicines. This is not the case of immediate liberation Quetiapina.
With respect to Maxime, the prolonged quetiapine release that he obtained in a recipe in Belgium must be reimbursed to him, because this medicine is well authorized and reimbursable in France. Its management “does not require prior formality in the sense of European regulations.” Article R 160-2 of the Social Security Code indicates that the reimbursement takes place in this case “under the same conditions as if the attention had been received in France, provided that the French regulations stipulate their attention.”
And yet Maxime has not yet been reimbursed. “I wrote to my deputy and his assistant to talk about the problem, confiscated the General Directorate of Health and must return to me,” he told BFM Business.
The responses to Quetiapina’s scarcity are considered insufficient in France
If Maxime and Michael Sikarov are ready to pay their pocket their treatment abroad, it is because the responses provided by the French health authorities to the shortage of quetiapine and psychotropic drugs in the broad sense are considered insufficient.
For several months, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) has recommended that health professionals no longer initiate treatment based on Quetiapina “, with the exception of patients with a depressed episode characterized as part of a bipolar disorder.” Therefore, doctors are invited to prescribe alternatives … but the possibilities are very thin.
Drugs containing lithium salts and venlafaxin have been recommended for a while, except that they are now in supply tension. As a result, the only alternative really proposed by the health authorities is to replace the prolonged liberation formula of quetiapina with the immediate release in the master preparation made by pharmacists.
A ministerial decree, dating from February 12, 2025, also makes possible the dispensation of the unit for all medications based on Quetiapina. But this method of release is controversial.
Are psychotropic prices too low?
Annoyed by the situation, the union of young doctors has taken into account the State and the ANSM to “assume the responsibility of a health crisis as silent as dramatic.” The Ministry organized a meeting in July with the union and the ANSM, but did not satisfy.
It is far from being the first time that the health authorities have been attacked in the prices of medicines in France. In 2024, the Leem, the lobby of the pharmaceutical laboratories in France, asked the firm Simon-Kucher & Partners (SKP) to analyze the prices of medications that appear in the list of essential molecules established by the Ministry of Health in June 2023.
There are two main lessons. First, “its prices are generally lower than those of the rest of the French market (56% have a price of the manufacturer excluding unit taxes of less than 1 euro and 36% less than 25 cents, against 41% and 26% respectively for other medications).”
These price fixing practices would explain at least in part, according to the union of young doctors, why there is a lack of therapeutic alternatives in France when psychotropic drugs are scarcity.
There is no request for a marketing authorization for the immediate release of Quetiapine
Requested by BFM Business, the Ministry of Health and Access to care indicates that “no laboratory that has submitted a application for marketing authorization (AMM) for a medication based on the immediate liberation quetiapine, this form is not marketed today.”
Immediate Liberation Quetiapina “is [autorisée] In some European countries, in which laboratories have applied and obtained an AMM. These are national AMM, or European AMM, but that involve only a few member states, depending on the choice of manufacturers, and are not valid for all of Europe, obtained in accordance with the “centralized” procedure called, the ministry details.
With respect to the formal notification letter sent in June by the union of young doctors, accompanied by his lawyer, I Cornélie Durrleman, the Ministry indicates to the BFM businesses that it will respond “in the next few days.”
It also defends its policy in terms of prevention of drug scarcity: “Significant financial sanctions have been imposed in 2024 for breach of actions of shares, and since August 2025, the agency can impose imports, contingents or export restrictions to guarantee the supply of the French market.” A decree published in the official magazine on August 5 also allows the ANSM to ask laboratories whose drugs are in tension to sell manufacturing rights.
Supply difficulties of “Improvement”
On the other hand, the ANSM reminds BFM the business that the shortage of Quetiapina stops “initially of a production problem found by its manufacturer, which provides several laboratories in which Tiapina (60% of the market).” “These difficulties are in the process of improving, but they have weakened the entire pharmacological chain: other manufacturers supplied by another manufacturer had to increase their production to meet the needs as much as possible,” he said.
“This is the case today after a specific and temporary problem in terms of a packaging site with the Vitris laboratory that largely complements the market: the precarious balance is no longer maintained, explaining the degradation of the situation in the coming weeks in certain doses until a significant supply announced in October by the industrial one.”
While the Union of Young Doctors is preparing to seize the State Council to put the Ministry of Health and the ANSM “given its responsibilities in public health”, the health agency emphasizes that leads to the “background work” to strengthen the supply of care in psychotropic drugs “, through a diversification of forms or suppliers,” says the ANSM.
Source: BFM TV
