Depression is 'over-diagnosed'

From the BBC

Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when all they are is unhappy, a leading psychiatrist says.

Professor Gordon Parker claims the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he calls depression a "catch-all" diagnosis driven by clever marketing.

But another psychiatrist writing in the journal contradicts his views, praising the increased diagnosis of depression.

Professor Ian Hickie writes that an increased diagnosis and treatment of depression has led to a reduction in suicides and removal of the old stigma surrounding mental illness.

Under the current diagnosis guidelines, around one in five adults is thought to suffer depression during their lifetime. This costs the UK economy billions in lost productivity and treatment.

Prof Parker, from the University of New South Wales, in Australia, said the "over-diagnosis" began around 25 years ago.

The professor, who carried out a 15-year study of 242 teachers, found that more than three-quarters of them met the current criteria for depression.

He writes in the BMJ that almost everyone had symptoms such as "feeling sad, blue or down in the dumps" at some point in their lives.

He said prescribing medication may raise false hopes and might not be effective as there was nothing biologically wrong with the patient.

The number of prescriptions for antidepressants in England hit a record high of more than 31 million prescriptions earlier this year.

In an odd example of journalistic bias, this article in Irish Health reports the exact same story, but headlines it with the phrase Depression underdiagnosed. Which is not the plain and obvious thrust of the original story. The headline is backwards in meaning.

Of course, some shrinks will scream if their drug schemes are exposed, because it means less easy money.