A study by Platform 51 claims that one in three women in the UK taken antidepressants in their lifetime. A quarter of those have taken them for over ten years.
Whatever the actual figures, clearly antidepressants are being prescribed for an awful lot of people. Are all those people suffering from a disease called depression? And do the drugs cure them? Dr Clare Gerada seems to think its not a problem and certainly seems to believe the drugs not only work, but they “save lives”.
But doctors’ leaders dismissed the poll as “alarmist”. Dr Clare Gerada, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said the drugs were a vital treatment. “Antidepressants save lives. In the past GPs have been criticised for being cautious about prescribing them and not prescribing them for long enough or in a high enough dose,” she said.
Maybe I should send Dr Gerada a copy of Irving Kirsch’s excellent summary of the evidence base for antidepressants. I think he makes it very clear that the issue of antidepressant prescribing is a complex one, and that while there is evidence the drugs do help people with the most severe forms of depression, there isn’t the same evidence they help people with mild or moderate depression (that’s most people).
There is a vast over-prescribing of antidepressants. Wouldn’t it be better to construct a health service around good mental health rather than around the prescribing of drugs? Wouldn’t that be more likely to both reduce suffering and to increase resilience and well-being?
Heroes Not Zombies 
Dr Gerada in the quote conflates two entirely separate problems to justify the current broad prescribing of antidepressants.
It is certainly true that GPs have in the past often missed diagnosing depression, and then when they did commence antidepressant therapy, they sometimes omitted to increase the dose to therapeutic levels for a sufficiently long trial before referring to secondary care.
However, it doesn’t logically follow that the current levels of antidepressant prescribing (often at borderline-therapeutic levels, or with multiple drugs at sub-maximal levels anyway) is necessarily appropriate.
These two strands of thought are really quite separate.
If that quote came from a non-medic or non-scientifically trained individual, one would simply call it sloppy thinking to conflate ideas in this way. On the other end of the spectrum, politicians and PR professionals of course regularly deliberately conflate different ideas in this way to actively promote an agenda regardless of underlying truth.
I hope and trust that Dr Gerada’s quote falls into neither of these unpleasant camps and is merely a momentary lapse.
My personal opinion is that earlier use of non-pharmacological interventions would remove the need to prescribe so many antidepressants, for those in the mild and moderate categories of depression (let alone those without true clinical depression!) but non-pharmacological interventions are time-consuming and expensive.
Antidepressants can indeed be life-saving and life-changing positive interventions… for those who need them. To target them correctly requires a lot of time, money and expertise. Our health service can’t consistently afford that kind of triaging, unfortunately.
Depression, anxiety etc, are human emotions that are caused by life.
Drugging an emotion defies sense, all it will do- either supress it or enhance it, either way it will not cure and only cause unnatural toxic chemicals to disrupt the natural brain responce.
Sience is experimentation and we are the victims.