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: But apart from medical symptoms, some pharmacological treatments can also increase psychological symptoms such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, and even increase suicide attempts ( especially in young adults ). A number of studies have suggested that there may be a significant publication bias in randomized controlled trials (RCT) reported by drug companies. For example, RCTs assessing the effectiveness of drug treatments are significantly more likely to report a positive effect if the study was funded by the pharmaceutical industry than if funds came from non-industry sources. This tends to suggest that drug companies may not publish studies that show that their drugs are ineffective! And this bias is also likely to significantly over-estimate the effectiveness of drugs for mental health problems. 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."