Almost one in four adults are being prescribed antidepressants, but this proliferation of pills is not only a waste of money but also prevents patients finding and addressing the real cause of their depression, writes Lucy Kenningham
I was 20 the first time I was prescribed antidepressants. I had gone to the doctors during January in rainy, miserable Manchester complaining of flu. Somehow, I came out of the appointment having been diagnosed with depression and prescribed a course of SSRIs. But in fact I didn’t have a mood disorder, and I didn’t need to go on medication.
Over the past decade, antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in the UK. More people than ever are taking these drugs – a number equivalent to almost one in four adults. They’re also doing so for longer – the average duration of time spent on them has doubled since the 2000s. . While this may be in line with increasing concern and focus on mental health, it is important to note that the vast majority of studies of SSRIs drop off after a year – meaning long term users are involved in a mass psychological experiment.
Despite the extra pills, mental health outcomes have worsened since the 1980s. “The evidence is overwhelming that the way we’ve gone about trying to understand and solve mental health problems for the last 30 years has failed,” says Dr James Davies. “We’ve not managed to improve mental health outcomes in that period, despite billions spent.” The gap in life expectancy between individuals with severe mental health issues and the general population has doubled since the 1980s and the mortality rate for those experiencing severe and sustained emotional distress is now 3.6 times higher than that of the general population.
That’s despite nearly a quarter of a trillion pounds having been allocated to mental health over the last four decades. The current system is not economically efficient. Doling out unnecessary pills is a waste of NHS money. Recent research reveals that the cost to the NHS of 5.4m people in England being unnecessarily prescribed psychiatric drugs is £560m a year. Societal costs have spiralled.
At the same time, the total cost of poor mental health is estimated to be around £300bn in England alone in 2022, which might explain why society and the NHS might see £560m as a reasonable investment.
The report, released today, proposes a radical rebalancing of the way we do things away from the traditional biomedical model towards a more holistic, person-centred approach that more fully recognises and addresses the social, economic and psychological determinants of mental health.
However, money, or rather money spent on drugs, is not necessarily the answer. The problem, according to Davies and the Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), has been the dominance of the biomedical model in mental health care. This approach considers mental distress to be a........