Overdosed

We have become a nation of sad pill-poppers. The British, once Churchill’s ‘lion-hearted nation’, are now among the most depressed people in the developed world. The UK ranks joint seventh out of 25 countries, with double the rates of Poland, Estonia and the Slovak Republic. According to the Children’s Society, English children are more miserable than those in 13 other countries such as Ethiopia and Algeria — despite the widespread introduction of ‘wellbeing’ lessons. One in six workers in England experiences ‘symptoms’ of mental illness, and around 300,000 people leave their jobs every year because of them. The cost to the economy is put at up to £99 billion.

And the lower we plummet, the more antidepressants we take. Doctors, at a loss for other solutions, dish them out like candy. Last month a study was splashed over the front pages suggesting that we should take more. A million extra NHS patients should be dosed up with them, said the report’s lead author, Oxford psychiatrist Professor Andrea Cipriani. He claims this meta-analysis provides ‘the final answer’ to the controversy over happy pills.

Can that be right? Is the science now complete, all questions answered? Or might Cipriani’s advice, and our cavalier attitudes to dosing ourselves with brain chemicals, be seriously misguided? As he says, the answer can be found in the study — although not in the way he thinks. Its findings do not support the hype at all. In fact, the difference between antidepressants and placebos was so marginal that scientific critics who have analysed the results (such as Professor Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre) call it clinically negligible.

For a start, the study — hailed by newspaper headlines like ‘The drugs do work’ — looks only at adults ‘with unipolar major depressive disorder’. Depressed young people are excluded. Many depressed adults are also excluded, partly because they are routinely excluded from trials in the first place.