Remember last week's story about how depression rates are soaring in Britain? It was all triggered by "new data" about an increase in antidepressant prescriptions.
At the time I was skeptical, not least because the data wasn't actually new, but I've done a bit more digging and it turns out the media coverage was even more misleading than I thought.
Here's some pretty graphs from the NHS Information Centre. I reiterate that all of these are freely available and have been for ages. Here's the one for antidepressants:
They've been rising strongly! In total prescription rates are about 60% higher now compared to in 2006. Oh dear.
What the papers didn't tell you is that pretty much every other class of drug has also increased over that period, by even more in some cases. Here's ADHD drugs, and dementia pills, which have increased by about 75% and 100% respectively:
There ...
