Number of Prescriptions Written in UK for
Antidepressants Nearly Equals Entire Population

Friday, December 04,
2009 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

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(NaturalNews) There were 36 million prescriptions issued for
antidepressant drugs in the United Kingdom in 2008, nearly one for every
adult in the population, according to numbers obtained by the Liberal
Democrat party.

The number is 2.1 million higher than in
2007.

Writing in the Guardian, Ed Halliwell examines the
reason for this trend, noting that antidepressant prescriptions have
increased more than threefold since the beginning of the 1990s, far
outstripping the increase in the percentage of the population classified
with a “common mental disorder.” From 1993 to 2007, this number increased
by only one million, going from 15.5 percent of the population to 17.6
percent.

Halliwell notes that while national guidelines recommend
that psychological therapies are the preferred treatment for mental
illness or distress, 75 percent of doctors report having prescribed drugs in cases where they
thought that therapy or other non-pharmaceutical treatments would have
been more effective. In part, this is because despite government
recommendations, psychotherapy treatment remains difficult to find in the
United Kingdom, with long waiting lists.

“However, medics also
prescribe drugs because that’s what they are trained to do – pills have
long been their (and our) default response to depression,”
Halliwell writes. “The dominant view of psychiatric illness is that
chemical imbalances in the brain are mostly to blame, and that they can be
controlled with pharmaceuticals.”

Yet a number of studies have
called into question whether antidepressants
are really significantly more effective than a placebo, and a much-touted
study identifying a “depression gene” was recently discredited by a new
analysis.

Halliwell calls for a shift away from a pharmaceutical
approach to depression, with a renewed emphasis on more well-proven
measures such as “building good relationships, lifelong learning, being
kind to others and exercise.”

He acknowledges the challenges
inherent in this approach.

“As well as an overhaul of services, it
means tackling social fragmentation, greed-based economics and the stress
created by a speedy, sensationalist culture,” he writes. “And it means
starting a mature debate based on understanding rather than fear of the
mind, promoting the ways we can look after our psychological as well as
our physical health.”

Sources for this story include: www.guardian.co.uk.