According to a new study, there is a growing concern among experts that antidepressant drugs are beginning to be handed out a little too freely these days.
In their research, the authors of an extremely controversial new paper hold back no punches.
"We've seen a marked increase in antidepressant use among individuals with no psychiatric diagnosis," study author Dr. Ramin Mojtabai, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said. "Between 1996 and 2007, the number of visits where individuals were prescribed antidepressants with no psychiatric diagnoses increased from 59.5 percent to 72.7 percent."
In order to come to their conclusion, researchers examined medical records for 230,000 patients who visited non-psychiatrists looking for help with their depression. As a result, these people often got drugs that aside from helping major depression, general anxiety disorder and other emotional problems also effected various physical problems. The problem, though, is that sometimes the prescribed drugs were not warranted.
The most blatant problem noted, however, was that some doctors were handing antidepressants when their medical records indicated that there was no reason to do so. The dangerous implications of this are obvious, and thanks to the aforementioned study, the experts can now finally put a stop to this potentially dangerous practice.
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