David Gutierrez
NaturalNews.com
December 4, 2009

There were 36 million prescriptions issued for antidepressant drugs in the United Kingdom in 2008, nearly one for every adult in the population, according to numbers obtained by the Liberal Democrat party.

The number is 2.1 million higher than in 2007.

Writing in the Guardian, Ed Halliwell examines the reason for this trend, noting that antidepressant prescriptions have increased more than threefold since the beginning of the 1990s, far outstripping the increase in the percentage of the population classified with a “common mental disorder.” From 1993 to 2007, this number increased by only one million, going from 15.5 percent of the population to 17.6 percent.

Halliwell notes that while national guidelines recommend that psychological therapies are the preferred treatment for mental illness or distress, 75 percent of doctors report having prescribed drugs in cases where they thought that therapy or other non-pharmaceutical treatments would have been more effective. In part, this is because despite government recommendations, psychotherapy treatment remains difficult to find in the United Kingdom, with long waiting lists.

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