Next time you’re at a baseball or football game in a stadium with 40,000 fans, consider this: More than 4,000 of them are on antidepressants.
One of every 10 Americans are now on medication for depression, according to a new study in the August Archives of General Psychiatry.
That’s a doubling of the rate over 10 years, from 1996 through 2005. Actual figures were 5.85 percent of the population (13 million) in 1996 and 10.2 percent (27 million) in 2005. Use of antidepressants increased across all sociodemographic groups except African Americans.
Two other interesting tidbits emerged from the study. One is that, while the number of people taking antidepressants soared, the number of patients on medication who were also getting psychotherapy (talk therapy) dropped.
Studies have shown that a combination of talk therapy and medication may be most effective for treatment of depression, but apparently more people are getting antidepressants from their primary care physician and leaving it at that.
But perhaps more disturbing is the reason behind the trend. True, taking meds for depression has become more socially acceptable. But the authors of the study — Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia – wrote that:
“Although there was little change in total promotional spending for antidepressants between 1999 ($0.98 billion) and 2005 ($1.02 billion), there was a marked increase in the percentage of this spending that was devoted to direct-to consumer advertising, from 3.3 percent ($32 million) to 12 percent ($122.00 million).”
In other words, the relentless bombardment on TV commercials is paying off for the big pharmaceutical companies. It was a $9.6 billion industry in 1998.
There are plenty of critics unhappy with the antidepressant drug boom. One is Eric Caine, psychiatrist at the University of Rochester in New York, He told Reuters: “There are no data to say that the population is healthier” because of the upward trend in antidepressant use.
“Indeed, the suicide rate in the middle years of life has been climbing.”
