According to a Reuters news report, the US government has been spending a lot on depression treatments.

 

Legal observers says “the increase in spending is believed to be caused mainly by the prolific increase in prescriptions written for antidepressants like Zoloft.”

 

Statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health says that “mental health spending per patient rose from $2,802 t0 $3,610 during the time period studied, with antidepressant use rising from 81 to 87 percent and antipsychotic drug prescriptions skyrocketing from 26 percent to 42 percent of patients.”

 

In addition, over the past 15 years, a high escalation of antidepressant use was shown in a study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). It also reflected a 400 percent increase in usage among adults 18-44 years of age, according to the website Psychiatric Times.

 

“The wrong people are on antidepressants and the right people aren’t taking them,” says the author of the article, Dr. Allen Frances.

 

“Just one-third of severely depressed people are taking them and more than two-thirds have no symptoms of depression,” he adds.

 

Aggressive marketing and advertising are blamed by Dr. Frances for being partly responsible for the increasing use of antidepressants.

 

In general, antidepressant drugs are supposed to reduce extreme sadness, hopelessness and lack of enthusiasm in life that are classic in people suffering from depression. These medicines are also used to deal with obsessive compulsive disorder, premenstrual syndrome, chronic pain, and eating disorders. Depression is considered a disorder of the brain. Its causes could be from psychological, genetic, environmental and biochemical factors like drug and alcohol intake.

 

Evaluating results from 372 studies about antidepressant drugs, the FDA discovered that they may cause children and teenagers to be suicidal, violent, hostile and irrational.

 

Moreover, the FDA in 2007 issued Zoloft warnings on the drug’s risk of increasing suicidal thoughts and behavior. The FDA ordered antidepressant manufacturers to label a “black box warning to the drug. Black box warnings are placed if the drug carries risk of a permanently-disabling, life threatening, or fatal side effect.

 

The New England Journal of Medicine, in 2008, published a research about antidepressant effectiveness being misrepresented in US publications. It claimed that studies showing antidepressant ineffectiveness were not usually published or were published with misleading results.

 

On November 9, 2011, the website PRWeb discussed the July 2011 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry suggesting a link between the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to an increased risk of having a baby with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

 

Aside from these warnings and reviews, medical reports from patients also present various complaints about the harmful side effects. This urged them to file Zoloft lawsuit against Pfizer, its drug manufacturer.

 

 

 

References:

· depression.emedtv.com/zoloft/zoloft-warnings-and-precautions.html

· prweb.com/releases/2011/11/prweb8817963.htm