Around 70 per cent of people regularly taking a powerful antidepressant don’t have depression, and they have never been diagnosed with any mental health problem.
And the doctors prescribing the drugs have no training in psychiatric disorders, a shocking new study has discovered.
There has been a rapid increase in prescriptions for antidepressant drugs between 1996 and 2007 – and yet 72.7 per cent of these have never been diagnosed with any mental health problem, or had been seen by a specialist. In the US, around 8.9 per cent of the adult population takes an antidepressant.
And 80 per cent of the prescriptions were written out by general practitioners without ever referring to a specialist to confirm the diagnosis of depression, say researchers from the Bloomberg School’s Department of Mental Health.
(Source: Health Affairs, 2011; 30: 1434).
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