Curb antidepressant prescribing to improve mental health, say campaigners

A group of 31 medical professionals, researchers, patients’ representatives, and politicians has called on the UK government to reverse the increase in antidepressant prescribing seen in the past decade.In a letter published in The BMJ,1 the authors, who include members of the Beyond Pills All Party Parliamentary Group, former health minister Norman Lamb, and several psychiatry professors, argue that evidence indicates that antidepressants benefit only people with the severest depression, and yet prescribing rates are high among those with mild and moderate depression.“Rising antidepressant prescribing is not associated with an improvement in mental health outcomes at the population level, which, according to some measures, have worsened as antidepressant prescribing has risen,” the group wrote.They suggested that the £58m spent on antidepressants each year in England could be better spent on boosting non-pharmacological interventions for depression.In 2022-23 a total of 86 million antidepressant items were prescribed to an estimated 8.6 million…
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