Antidepressant Use Doubles in UK in Past Decade, Even Greater Increase Last Year

Seroxat [Paxil] antidepressant pills.
Photograph: Jack Sullivan/Alamy
The number of antidepressants prescribed by the NHS
has almost doubled in the last decade, and rose sharply last year as the
recession bit, figures reveal.

The health service issued 39.1m prescriptions for drugs to tackle depression in England in 2009, compared
with 20.1m in 1999 – a 95% jump. Doctors handed out 3.18m more prescriptions
last year than in 2008, almost twice the annual rise seen in preceding years,
according to previously unpublished statistics released by the NHS’s Business
Services Authority.

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4/28/2001 – A Prescription for Violence? (School Shootings)

Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety
Center says: Its the thought that if youre going to put Charlie Manson in my
class I have a right to know that. . . We have kids so medicated its
incredible. I dont see parents asking the question about the numbers of
children on psychotropic drugs as being all that invasive. The public would
be shocked at the number of file drawers of prescription drugs that teachers
are asked to dispense. . . . it would be a great study for someone to go back
and see how many of the kids who committed these violent acts were on these
drugs.

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02/15/2001 – Doctors Say Drug Trial's Approval was Backdated

The Nigerian doctor who supervised a 1996 Pfizer Inc. drug experiment on
desperately ill children said in an interview that his office created a
backdated ethics approval document that the American pharmaceutical company
later used to satisfy U.S. regulators and to justify its conduct of the
human testing.

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