“A persistent decline in the rate of Americans, especially children, newly diagnosed with depression followed the first federal warning on risks connected with antidepressant drugs, a study suggests.
“In 2003, the Food and Drug Administration first warned about the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in young people taking the drugs. That action may have helped reverse a five-year trend of rising rates of diagnosis for depression, the researchers found.
“The findings, published Monday [June 1, 2009]Â in the Archives of General Psychiatry, are based on an analysis of eight years of data from nearly 100 managed care plans and more than 55 million patients.
“It was already known that antidepressant use among young people had fallen since the drugs began carrying a so-called “black box” warning about risks. But the data showing an extended decline in the level of depression diagnoses are new.”
(Original article from Associated Press, by Carla K. Johnson, Jun 1, 2009.)
[Editorial Comment: The data suggests that psychiatric diagnoses only increased because of the amount of money that could be made by labeling children with a psychiatric disorder and prescribing them psychiatric drugs.]
Marginalized by the field of medicine because of its lack of scientific credentials, psychiatry today works hard to create an apparent scientific image for its diagnostic system, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and the use of prescription psychiatric drugs.