And the doctors prescribing these drugs have had no training in psychiatric disorders, a shocking new study has revealed.
There has been a rapid increase in prescriptions for antidepressant drugs between 1996 and 2007-and yet, 72.7 per cent of these patients have never been diagnosed with any mental-health problem nor ever 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 these prescriptions were written out by general practitioners with no referrals to a specialist to confirm the diagnosis of depression, say researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, and Columbia University in New York City (Health Affairs, 2011; 30: 1434-42).
WDDTY 22 no 7, October 2011
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