Antidepressants Are over Prescribed Essay

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Antidepressants are overprescribed

Mitrea (2007) defines antidepressants as an agent or a drug that is most commonly used to prevent or treat depression. However, in today’s society it could be said that antidepressants are being over prescribed and are being used to treat a vast range of other conditions, as well as clinical depression. When the first antidepressant was developed, manufacturers were reluctant to put it on the market due to the extremely low number of people suffering from depression. Now, antidepressant drugs have a very dominant place in the drug market, with studies showing that they are now one of the most widely prescribed categories of drugs (Mark 2010). There could be a number of reasons for this increase in …show more content…
The prescribing of antidepressants to those patients who were not symptomatic was accounted for by relapse prevention, and for the ongoing successful treatment of previously identified depression. Among the patients with probable depression, half did not have their symptomatic status identified and were not offered any treatment for depression, suggesting that GPs may under prescribe, rather than over prescribe antidepressants (Cameron et al. 2009)

The increasingly common belief that antidepressants are being over prescribed is mainly down to the fact that the number of antidepressant prescriptions has significantly risen over the last few years. However, when researchers looked more closely at antidepressant prescribing activity, they found an altogether different situation, which showed that only a very small number of patients were being given such drugs without reason (Reid 2009). The main aim of the study was to investigate whether patients who did not meet the criteria laid out in the national guidelines were unnecessarily being prescribed antidepressants, which are also often used to treat pain. The findings showed that only 3 out of a total of 897 patients who took part in the study were being given an antidepressant drug unnecessarily. Many patients who met the criteria in the national guidelines and qualified for treatment with antidepressants were not being given them, which adds to
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