Title: Overprescribing Drugs to Treat Mental Health Problems | Psychology Today
Headings: Overprescribing Drugs to Treat Mental Health Problems
Graham C.L. Davey Ph.D.
Overprescribing Drugs to Treat Mental Health Problems
10 reasons why drugs shouldn't be a treatment of choice for mental disorders.

Content: While prescribing drugs for mental health problems may have a short-term palliative effect, drugs don’t obviously help people to change the way they think or change the socio-economic environments that might be the root cause of their psychological problems. We know that negative and biased ways of thinking can maintain common mental health problems such as anxiety or depression—these important factors need to be addressed with psychotherapy—not drugs. Helping an individual with mental health problems to rise above difficult socioeconomic conditions is challenging within any kind of treatment approach, but multidisciplinary teams of mental health professionals are increasingly able to help clients with a broader range of psychological and socioeconomic problems. Sadly, many of those health professionals (GPs and family physicians) at the first point of contact with people suffering from mental health problems are poorly trained to identify psychological problems in their patients and have little time available to devote to dealing with these types of problems. This increasingly makes medication prescription an attractive option for doctors whose time-per-patient is limited—an outcome that will have all the potential negative effects of medicalizing the problem into a "disease." At present, we don’t have any wealthy "multinational psychotherapy conglomerates" to match the financial clout of the pharmaceutical industry, so when it comes to "selling" treatments for mental health problems, drugs will always have the marketing advantage regardless of whether they are more or less effective than psychological therapies. That’s an uneven playing field that needs to be addressed. article continues after advertisement
These are just some of the reasons why we should be wary of the increasing trend of treating psychological problems with medications, and in many cases, medications without accompanying psychological help and support. Certainly, attempts are being made in many countries to increase access to psychological therapies for those who need them, but while mental health is still viewed primarily as a medical problem within health care systems promoting medical models, little is likely to change rapidly. SHARE
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Mental Health Care
Submitted by Jarvis on March 15, 2014 - 8:04am
Mental health problems are very serious than any sort of health diseases.