8 Surprising Reasons People Are Taking Antidepressants

There's been a lot of concern over the "skyrocketing" use of antidepressants over the last 20 years. Many experts believe that these rising numbers indicate either higher depression rates or an over-diagnosis of mental illness. But there is at least one more factor, courtesy of a new study published in the journal JAMA: An increasing number of people are taking antidepressant medications for completely separate conditions, according to an analysis of nine years of prescription data in Quebec, Canada. Only about 55 percent of antidepressant prescriptions were written to alleviate depression symptoms, while the rest were written for a wide variety of other conditions that aren’t related to depression. Some of these were prescribed in what's known as “off-label” use -- when a medicine is prescribed to treat a condition for which it wasn’t officially approved, or when a medicine is taken in a different dose or method than the manufacturers originally intended. While using medications for unapproved conditions is common and perfectly safe under the care of a doctor, the increasing rate of off-label antidepressant use is an important reminder for experts not to assume that patients who are taking antidepressants have depression, said lead study author Jenna Wong, a PhD student with the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal. Other reasons people take antidepressants We've known for a while that there are ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news