Depression is over-diagnosed and over-treated

From News Target.com

Leading mental health researcher Gordon Parker says that psychiatrists are too quick to diagnose and treat people for depression. Parker made his claims in an article in the British Medical Journal. Criticizing the current diagnosis guidelines as overly broad, Parker says that the term has now become a "catch-all" for a variety of normal emotional conditions.

"Over the last 30 years, the formal definitions for defining clinical depression have expanded into territory of normal depression, and the real risk is that the milder, more common experiences risk being pathologized," Parker writes.

[...]

Parker is a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and the director of the Black Dog Institute at Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, an institution that focuses on treating mood disorders.

In his article, he expresses concern that too many people are being prescribed medication for normal mood lows that have no biological basis. In these cases, he says, drugs may be less effective and might even raise false hopes among patients.

Parker says that in a 15-year study of 242 teachers that he conducted, more than 75 percent met the criteria for clinical depression.

[...]

According to [the mental health charity] SANE, it is safer to err on the side of over-diagnosing, in order to reduce suicide risk. But the charity, not surprisingly, openly accepts donations from the very drug companies that profit from the over diagnosis of mental health disorders.

"There is no question," said Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, "that the current trend of diagnosing nearly every human emotion, condition and experience as a disease requiring chemical treatment is little more than a marketing scheme intended to sell more drugs."