The tide of prescribing for depression is turning

Recently, prescribing of antidepressant drugs has increased exceptionally.1 At the same time, concerns have been raised about the medicalisation of human distress and, more recently, about the safety of antidepressants.1 Many general practitioners would like to refer patients for psychological treatment, for which there is good evidence of effectiveness,2 but are constrained by the lack of NHS therapists. We estimated the opportunity cost of the recent rise in antidepressant prescribing by valuing it in terms of an effective alternative treatment—cognitive behaviour therapy. We used Department of Health data on the number and cost of antidepressant drugs dispensed in the community in England to quantify the changes between 1991 and 2002. The baseline year (1991) was chosen to ensure a meaningful timescale and to cover a period of consistent approaches to recording. We took population statistics from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/, and applied an inflation rate of 32% (from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/rpi/) to 1991 costs. We estimated the number of patients that could have been treated using cognitive …