Is It Always Best When The Doctor Gets Involved?

Shocking statistics released in the UK show that during 2006 doctors made over 31 million prescriptions of antidepressant pills. The exact number of patients this equates to can only be guesstimated but is reckoned to run into the several million. Similar generalizations from the US indicate that possibly between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 of all US citizens may be prescribed antidepressants within their lifetime. Comparative studies often show a broadly similar pattern of effectiveness in treating depression between pills and talk therapies. Many pills have indications of worrying problems, from dependency through to unpleasant side effects. Whatever the efficacy of these antidepressant pills themselves, they highlight a worrying trend in public health – medicalization, wh View the rest of this article