Little is known about what sort of treatment DSP patients receive following DSP episodes. To our knowledge no studies have explored whether and how prescribing to DSP patients changes following an episode of DSP. This is the case both for overall medication load, and in relation to specific drugs, CUDC-907 such as antidepressants or drugs ingested in the episode. Our previous findings showed that it is the high medication load in general rather than the timing of single prescriptions in relation to time of episode that carries risk for deliberate self-poisoning. Although medical conditions in most cases are unlikely to change abruptly following a DSP episode, the act itself may affect prescribing on an individual level either by serving as a marker of underlying problems not previously recognised by the prescriber, or by alerting prescribers to hitherto unacknowledged risks associated with on-going, long-term access to prescribed drugs. Moreover, the finding that the majority of DSP patients used medication prescribed to them in their DSP episodes raises the question as to whether access to drugs ingested in the DSP episode changes after a DSP episode. To our knowledge no studies have explored whether and how prescribing to DSP patients changes following an episode of DSP. This is the case both for overall medication load and in relation to specific drugs,CX-4945 such as antidepressants or drugs ingested in the episode. The objectives of this study were to investigate changes in 1) overall, psychotropic, non-psychotropic and antidepressant pre-scribed medication availability in DSP patients after compared with before an episode of DSP, 2) changes in prescribing of the medication ingested in the episode, and 3) potential effects of gender, age and repeater status on such change. The pre-post increase for total medication load is perhaps not surprising given that the index DSP episode may have served to alert patients’ general practitioners about hitherto unacknowl-edged mental health problems. However, the increase was not driven by an increase in psychotropic medication load alone: both types of medication increased.