Antidepressant suicide warnings 'backfired'

Conclusion This study saw a decrease in the prescribing of antidepressants in adolescents and young people, and an overall increase in psychotropic medication overdoses. Thankfully, however, there was no change in completed suicide rates, following the FDA's warnings that they can increase suicidality. Strengths of this study include the very large number of people included in the analysis. The researchers used the same parameters for assessing antidepressant prescriptions, overdoses requiring medical attention and death due to suicide throughout the study period. Although this will not capture all of the attempted overdoses, the data collection was consistent, so trends in the rates should be comparable. However, the authors report several limitations, including the fact: they could only take into account overdoses that required medical attention the sample was almost exclusively of people with medical insurance, so the results may not be applicable to uninsured people in the US (who tend to be poorer and/or come from an ethnic minority) Further limitations of this study are that it looked at the population as a whole and did not look at any difference according to: sex, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status diagnosis or severity of illness other confounding factors, such as the recession The study only looked at the incidence of antidepressant use, psychiatric drug overdose and number of completed suicides across the whole population. The stu...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Medication Mental health Pregnancy/child Source Type: news