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Big news today from the U.K. In the past decade, prescriptions for anti-depressants in children have quadrupled but the diagnosis rates have not increased dramatically.
From BBC News:
GPs in England wrote more than 631,000 such prescriptions for children in the last financial year, compared to just 146,000 in the mid-1990s.
But at the same time, figures suggest the rate of mental health problems in the young has not changed markedly.
Liz Spikol is senior contributing editor of Philadelphia Weekly. She writes the award-winning column The Trouble With Spikol, which began as a chronicle of her struggle with mental illness, and has since expanded into humorous musings on everything from graphic novels to how to use a mop. She also writes the paper's book review column, Lit Gloss. This blog -- named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 by PsychCentral -- is about mental illness policy, news, personal journeys and more.
Comments
Actually, if you check the table that I have produced from the Government's data, you can see that the child use of antidepressants is only up by a factor of 1.4 among under-16s. The real problem is behaviour control drugs, use of which has increased over the last decade almost ten-fold among under-16s and almost twenty-fold among 16-18 year olds in full-time education. [See The Difference: Our Orwellian State - http://thedifferencemagazine.blogspot.com/2007/07/our-orwellian-state.html]
Posted by: John Hayward, The Difference | July 23, 2007 03:50 PM