Number of Americans Taking Antidepressants Doubles
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The number of Americans using antidepressants doubled in only a decade, while the number seeing psychiatrists continued to fall, a study shows. About 10% of Americans — or 27 million people — were taking antidepressants in 2005, the last year for which data were available at the time the study was written. That’s about twice the number in 1996, according to the study of nearly 50,000 children and adults in today’s Archives of General Psychiatry. Yet the majority weren’t being treated for depression. Half of those taking antidepressants used them for back pain, nerve pain, fatigue, sleep difficulties or other problems, the study says.
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Dr. Garber’s Comments:
The information in this article raises so many issues it’s hard to know where to even start. More and more people are being prescribed antidepressants, not necessarily for depression and not necessarily by psychiatrists. There are serious consequences to taking these drugs as I have discussed many times before. The whole concept of the “off-label” use of drugs and how the pharmaceutical companies promote it is finally coming under scrutiny, as recently witnessed by Pfizer’s $2.3 billion fine for it’s dangerous off-label promotion of several of it’s drugs. The fact that many people who would benefit from psychiatric care don’t get it because of inadequate or no insurance coverage for that type of care, and end up being prescribed potentially harmful drugs by by doctors who’s expertise lay elsewhere, is just one small piece of the current health care delivery mess we have now.
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