Saturday, July 9, 2016

Antidepressants Cost NHS £5.5M A Week

Katie Gibbons
July 6 2016, 12:01am, The Times

(excerpt)












The National Health Service is spending £285 million a year on antidepressant pills

The NHS is spending a record £780,000 a day on antidepressants as failing mental health services struggle to provide alternative therapies, new figures show.

Prescriptions for drugs to treat depression have more than doubled from 29 million in 2005 to 61 million last year. This, combined with the cost of the drugs rising by 7.4 per cent from 2014-15, means that the health service is paying £285 million a year for antidepressant pills.

Despite pledges from the government to increase access to talking treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy, patients are still routinely handed drugs by GPs rather than being…



Thank You Ms Gibbons and The Times

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