There was literally a time when patients suffering from depression used to talk about their problems. But times have changed and now talk therapy is becoming a rarer form of treatment in favor of psychotropic drugs. A pair of studies, which ran from 1998 to 2007, tracked the use of antidepressants versus psychotherapy to treat depression among inpatients. Both were a followup of sorts to similar research done a decade earlier which saw a doubling in the amount of outpatients treated with antidepressants for this population. From 1987 to 1997, the percentage of patients prescribed antidepressant medication rose from 37.3 percent to 74.5 percent. One of the more recent studies, put together by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, found the trend toward antidepressants continued. Researchers collected data from what is known as the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which tracks depression diagnoses as well as means of treatment. The University of Pennsylvania study concluded that antidepressant use among outpatients remained relatively the same (73.8 percent in 1998 versus 75.3 percent in 2007). The use of psychotherapy as a treatment option declined from 53.6 percent in 1998 to 43.1 percent in 2007. Steven Corey Marcus, one of the study authors, noted that a similar study found the number of Americans using antidepressants jumped from five percent to 10 percent from 1996 to 2005. “(That’s) much faster than the rate of depression treatment rose,” Marcus said in a 2010 blog on Discovery Magazine’s web site. “In other words, the decade must have seen antidepressants increasingly being used to treat stuff other than depression. SSRIs are popular in everything from anxiety and OCD to premature ejaculation.”
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