The proportion of older people taking antidepressants more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, despite there having been no corresponding rise in the prevalence of depression, a study has found. In the early 1990s fewer than one in twenty people over the age of 65 took antidepressants but this rose to one in ten between 2008 and 2011. Over the same period rates of depression for that age group fell slightly, from 7.9 per cent to 6.8 per cent. The study, published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, involved interviews with more than 15,000 over-65s in the early 1990s and between 2008 and 2011. Scientists who analysed the data suggested that the rising use of…

Source: The Times October 06, 2019 23:02 UTC