Are Antidepressant Drugs Being Prescribed Too Widely? A Review of “Evidence-biased Antidepressant Prescription”

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In the Global North, mental health problems have ceased to be closely guarded family secrets and become a socially acceptable topic of conversation. While princes, politicians and pop stars openly share their tales of personal despair with the entire global village, the villagers themselves are increasingly emboldened to seek medical support while navigating their own troubles and travails. Maybe the most widely discussed mental health issue is depression, which the World Health Organization now ranks as the number one cause of disability burden worldwide.

Michael P. Hengartner, in his new book Evidence-biased Antidepressant Prescription: Overmedicalisation, Flawed Research and Conflicts of Interest, reminds us that ā€œuntil the 1970s, depression was considered a severe but rare disorderā€¦ Depression experts of the time consistently emphasised that most people with depression would recover spontaneously and remain well.ā€

The shift to todayā€™s conventional wisdomā€”that depression is a highly prevalent medical condition requiring a pharmaceutical responseā€”only took place in the 1980s, deliberately boosted by pharmaceutical companies hoping to increase the market for antidepressant drugs.

Illustration of prison bars made of prescription drugs with hands holding them

Hengartner forcefully argues that these drugs are now being widely overprescribed, and probably cause most patients more harm than good. To make his case, he takes a broad sweep, discussing how depression is defined, researched and treated.

He contends that the current threshold for diagnosing depression is far too low and rests on vague criteria, causing epidemiologists to overestimate its prevalence and doctors to needlessly medicate healthy people. Echoing Allen Francesā€™ classic book Saving Normal, he writes that ā€œmany conditions diagnosed as major depression are neither major nor a mental disorder,ā€ but rather ā€œnormal (adaptive) responses to problems of everyday lifeā€ that do not require medical treatment.

On the research front, Hengartnerā€™s main gripe is with the dominant ā€œchemical imbalance and serotonin deficiencyā€ model of depression favoured by industry, which he claims is not supported by evidence, has yielded very little insight into the neurobiology of depression, and has led to almost no progress in mental healthcare. Furthermore, he flags widespread and systematic biases in the design of clinical trials of antidepressant drugs, including unrepresentative samples, very short observation periods, frequent unblinding, co-medication with sedative-hypnotic drugs, as well as downstream reporting bias. In Hengartnerā€™s view, decades of antidepressant trials have ā€œstill not conclusively answeredā€¦ how well antidepressants workā€ and whether their effects are clinically relevant.

Meanwhile, professionals like himself who question the conventional wisdom on these drugs or highlight their harms are routinely marginalised or discredited, Hengartner complains. ā€œThese discrediting attacks certainly keep some researchers from addressing critical research questions and asking inconvenient questionsā€¦ Deliberately or not, such attacks silence dissenting voices and result in scientific censorship.ā€ As a result, there is limited awareness among clinicians and patients of the sometimes severe and possibly lifelong harmful side effects of antidepressant drugs.

As a first step towards fixing the system, Hengartner proposes narrowing down the definition of depression. In addition, instead of immediately reaching for the prescription pad, primary care providers in most cases should steer patients towards non-pharmaceutical treatment pathways, or simply adopt a stance of watchful waiting. For patients with severe depression, drugs should only be prescribed after careful discussion of their potential side effects, including the risk of dependency. Finally, future clinical trials should be publicly funded and focus on quality of life outcome measures rather than just on core depression symptoms, and be supplemented by ā€œpragmatic real-world effectiveness trials with representative samples and long-term follow-upā€ of at least six months.

This book is well written, well researched and exhaustively referenced throughout. In addition, while the author is relentless in his critique of the status quo, he deliberately steers clear of extremism, taking pains to emphasise that ā€œa blanket condemnation of antidepressants is inappropriate and not in the patientsā€™ best interest, for some adults with severe clinical depression may benefit from antidepressants.ā€

Hengartner magnificently succeeds in his goal of making a strong argument that antidepressants are being overprescribed. However, being firmly located within one of two hostile camps, he sometimes appears to succumb to the temptation of setting up strawmen to knock down, and may not always give countervailing arguments and evidence the space and consideration that they deserve.

As a layperson not familiar with the broader literature, I would be cautious in treating this book as the final word on a complex issue, but can warmly recommend it a well-researched and highly readable entry point into this important debate.

 

This book review is published under a creative commons license (CC-BY 4.0).

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussionā€”broadly speakingā€”of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

3 COMMENTS

  1. In the US, a middle age woman cannot walk into a hospital – with a pulled muscle, and no complaints about depression – without being asked, “Are you depressed?”

    So indeed, antidepressants are being overprescribed.

    I think the best way to say no to an antidepressant is to tell the doctor you are not depressed, and are allergic to the anticholinergic drugs.

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  2. I agree many factors are at play, and IMO, a central issue in the over prescription of antidepressants is the expansively defined diagnostic criteria of “depression” and the restrictively defined criteria of “mania” in the 1980 DSM-III which we still live with today. According to modern research as well as that of a century ago, 60% of all mood presentations are “mixed” and only 20% are either depressed or manic. I cover these issues at: https://medicalmodelredux.com/

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    • I think the more relevant fact is that a century ago, most “depressed” people recovered without any help from the “authorities.” Depression as a “chronic condition” was very, VERY rare back in the day. The frequency of chronic “depression,” however defined, has only increased since the helpful insistence of giving everyone who feels bad a ‘diagnosis’ and prescribing drugs that can be harmful and giving up on the idea that a person has the resources to address their own emotional condition, even if they may need some assistance with that. Trying to redefine episodes as really ‘mixed’ vs. ‘manic’ vs. ‘depressed’ is very much an act of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The iceberg has long since been hit and we should be trying to help people escape rather than sorting them out into which room they are to go down in.

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