The other week I read in the New York Times about a “glut of antidepressants.” The story was about the loose (and perhaps over-diagnosis) of depression in a community sample of over 5,600 patients.
Most of those patients examined who supposedly had clinical depression turned out to, in fact, not have it — only just over 38 percent met the official criteria after 12 months.
Somehow this got convoluted with the increase in antidepressants over the past two decades. “One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four.”
While we can lament this increase all we want, I also can’t help but say, “So what?”