One in eight people in England are taking antidepressants after the lockdowns fuelled a 7% increase in demand for medication in one year, NHS statistics show. The Telegraph has the story.
Charities said the official figures were an “alarming” sign of an escalating crisis, with the numbers taking the pills rising by more than half a million in one year.
The statistics show a record 8.3 million people being prescribed the drugs, of whom two thirds are female.
It comes after the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said in November that people suffering mild depression should be offered a choice of exercise or therapy instead of being put on pills.
The body recommended group classes in areas such as meditation or behavioural therapy, or opting for individual counselling sessions.
Last year Prof Sir Stephen Powis, National Medical Director for the NHS in England, said doctors were too often offering “a pill for every ill’’, warning that over-prescribing was costing the NHS “millions”.
The new statistics released by the NHS Business Services Authority show that since 2015/6, the total number of people on antidepressants has risen by 22%…
In the year 2020/21 8.32 million were prescribed antidepressants – up 540,000 in one year, the statistics show. Among them were 71,000 children and young people aged 17 and under – where prescribing rose by 9% in a year.
Of those, almost 12,000 were aged between 10 and 14, while 780 were below the age of 10.
Last year a survey by mental health charity Mind found that two thirds of adults said their mental health had worsened since the first national lockdown.
One quarter of those polled said they had experienced mental distress for the first time during the pandemic.
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I think this is another area of life where we’ve normalised nonsense. The people I know who take these things, the fact that they’re happy to let you know shows just how ‘normal’ it’s become, are invariably covid/lockdown zealots. So many just need a life, friends, exercise, sunshine, none of which are available in a bottle of pills.
Agree 100%. Severe Depression is actually quite a rare illness, and I would bet most people have never been around anyone who has genuine symptoms of this.
The diagnostic parameters for a lot of what were disabling but rare conditions such as Depression, Bi-polar disorder, (itself rebranded from Manic Depressive Psychosis to include those not actually psychotic), General Anxiety Disorder, Autism have been widened to such a degree by complicit Psychiatrists and GP’s (and promoted to the public as “normal” by celebrity “sufferers”), that mental health services in the main are now using up their resources on the worried well, the disgruntled, the lonely and those in some kind of social crisis. Meanwhile the severe mentally ill are sitting quietly at the back of the queue, often with no insight and therefore not realising the need for help, slowly getting less well.
That’s before we get into the new kid on the block “disorders”, that seem to exist simply to medicalise (and excuse) every form of (mostly childhood) behaviour that is undesirable, but was managed in previous decades by sensible parenting; Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Oppositional Disorder, Adult ADHD etc, etc.
I’m not saying the worried well, the lonely, those in social crisis etc don’t need help, empathy and support; it just shouldn’t come from a service whose remit is to diagnose and treat Severe and Enduring Mental Illness, (and it should not necessitate the used of medications).
All IMHO, and yes, I am aware my rant has wandered quite a bit off topic!
thefoostybadger, you say you bet most people have never been around anyone who has genuine symptoms of severe depression. Well I definitely have – two family members at different times, my mother and my brother.
However, I am convinced that in the case of my brother, and probably also my mother, what started off as troublesome but relatively mild depression, developed into severe depression after and because they started taking antidepressants.
Antidepressants may help some people, but there is still immense ignorance about the very real possibility that these powerful psychiatric drugs can make depression far worse, and cause various severe adverse effects, which are then thought to be due to ’the illness’, and so the doctor increases the dose, and it’s a vicious circle.
Meanwhile – unless the patient is lucky enough to find a good therapist – the causes of the original depression get ignored.
Hi there. Sorry to hear about your relatives, I hope that they are okay now.
It depends on how you define mild, mild to moderate, moderate to severe, and severe depression.
I suspect my definitions are pretty much obsolete in today’s clinical arena.
To me, severe depression is someone who is slowed both physically and mentally, poorly motivated to the extent they will not get up out of bed, take care of themselves, lose interest in pretty much everything, and possibly even have psychotic features such as delusions of unworthiness. Negativity will pervade every thought.
In 35 years working in acute psychiatry, I saw 3 or 4 patients like this; the majority would present with mild to moderate/moderate to severe…..bad enough!
I agree 100% with your main point, inappropriate use of anti-depressants would be counterproductive and bring their own problems, whereas for that small group I mentioned medication is essential, (as well as the non pharmacological interventions of course).
My mother’s depression was many years ago, and she eventually recovered quite well, but died not long after.
My brother suffered severe depression during the first lockdown (not for the first time) and you have described him perfectly in your description of severe depression, but it was relatively mild to begin with and only became severe after he started taking antidepressants. His doctor kept telling him to give the antidepressants time to work, and increased the dose, but he got worse and worse, including suffering some very bizarre symptoms.
He was vehemently opposed to seeing a counsellor (even though rich enough to easily afford it) because he was convinced there was something chemically wrong with his brain which only a drug could rectify.
After several weeks of going through hell, he was eventually convinced by me and my sister that he would have nothing to lose by attending counselling, and to his amazement, very soon after he began to attend, he very quickly began to improve, and was quite soon back to normal.
I don’t know if he continued taking the antidepressants, as I didn’t want to intrude too much, as he has the right to freely make up his own mind, but I just pointed out the potential adverse effects, and I suggested either coming off the antidepressants under supervision or to get his doctor to change his antidepressants. It’s too much of a sensitive subject for me to ask him if he did either, but he’s fine now, back to his normal self.
I agree. I have a friend who has suffered with mild anxiety in the past. As a result of the Covid PsyOps campaign, her anxiety returned and she told me she felt depressed. Normally a very sociable person, the suspension of her social life had a negative effect …. but one you would expect to resolve itself once the restrictions were lifted.
Instead of making the best of the situation she went, as she said, “on the happy pills” and is now terrified of coming off them again.
What a surprise. A cynic might note that the manufacturers of such drugs are winning both ways, to some extent.
SSRIs are barely better than placebo https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/04/30/do-anti-depressants-work/ and create dependency.
Some of them work well for COVID, though!
I wonder how often this is the result of lazy ‘doctoring?’
1 in 8?
Good god. I knew out society was sick, but I’m astounded. I guess I’m not the cynic I thought I was.
I would really be interested in finding out what percentage of the population are not on any kind of long term medication.
I fear it is a minority.
In his discussions about the mass formation which emerged at the beginning of 2020 and resulted in the hysterical response to SARS-COV-2, Mattias Desmet talked about how one of the contributory factors to the conditions for this mass hypnosis being possible was a crisis of loneliness in society – people lacking close social bonds with friends, neighbours, family, their local community. And points out the huge scale of anti-depressant prescriptions even before the virus arrived.
Desmet points out that ironically the arrival of COVID temporarily solved this problem, or appeared to, as getting together with other COVIDians to “fight the virus” gave people a group identity and some sense of purpose in life. Like many people in a crisis situation, they felt more alive than ever. But Desmet says this feeling is illusory because people feel bound to the collective – the group following the COVID narrative – not individuals, and so they aren’t really creating new bonds with individual people (which would ultimately help them and alleviate their depression). As a consequence, when the mass hypnosis fades, people will be even more lonely than before.
Desmet says society will repeatedly experience these mass hypnosis events until the root causes (lack of social bonds, lack of meaning in life (bullshit jobs) and free-floating anxiety and frustration) are addressed. In his view all of these things are a consequence of our very materialistic and mechanistic lives. Too much technology, not enough humanity.
Antidepressants? Why? They don’t work. Just one more pharma disaster. I have an idea, how about if the governments in the free world actually reinstated our freedoms. No lockdowns, no masks, no dangerous experimental biologicals, no social distancing, no school closures, no working from home, no food and fuel shortages, no track and trace, no vaxx passports, no chem trails. Did I leave anything out
Once again, Big Pharma is making £millions …. with the NHS pushing drugs most people will derive little or no benefit from.
Mild to moderate depression doesn’t need pills ….. it needs motivation: exercise; walks in the countryside; gardening; someone to talk/listen to you; things to look forward to. None of these are found in a bottle of magic pills.
And these anti-depressant pills can be dangerous. My late mother suffered a breakdown and depression. She was put on anti-depressants and after two dreadful years of decline, committed suicide at the 3rd attempt (around 16 years ago). A couple of years’ after her death it was admitted that the pills she’d been put on were linked to an increase in the likelihood of suicide.
There will be many more suicides and deaths as a result of depression and over-reliance on anti-depressants but really caused, once again, by the Covid Lockdowns.