A new report has revealed that nearly one in four adults living in the UK are currently being prescribed a psychiatric drug such as an antidepressant, and those under 25 are taking more than double the amount of these pills than they were a decade ago.
Beyond Pills is the cross-party parliamentary group behind the scathing report on the crisis in the UK’s mental health services titled Shifting the Balance Towards Social Interventions. The group has called for a complete re-think of the way we help people living with mental health issues in the UK. They claim that despite a record-breaking number of prescriptions, and huge amounts of investment, patient outcomes for mental health are the worst they have been since the 1980s.
“We have reached a crisis point in the nation’s mental health. Nearly a quarter of the adult population is prescribed a psychiatric drug in any given year, and a similar proportion of young people now meet the criteria for a mental health diagnosis,” the report says. “Waiting lists for NHS treatment are up to three years, NHS provision for psychotherapy is patchy and often of low quality, and interventions directed at the social and psychological causes of distress have been under-prioritised.”
In 2011 prescriptions for antidepressants totaled 47.3 million in the UK, since then it has almost doubled to 85.6 million. These prescriptions are being handed out to around 8.6 million people, although this number is expected to rise significantly over the next ten years.
In 2019 around one in nine children met the criteria required for a mental health diagnosis, the figure has since risen to one in five. The under-25 age group have seen the steepest rise in the amount of antidepressants issued with the total number more than doubling from 2.5 million in 2015 to 4.1 million in 2023.
One of the group’s recommendations to help bring these numbers down is to steer patients away from pharmaceutical-only treatments, and towards more social-based interventions, emphasising patient-focused treatment rather than the use of generic drugs.
“Mental health outcomes have not improved despite substantial investments in services and research, with rates of poor mental health worsening in the general population and the mortality gap widening between individuals with severe mental health problems and the general population. The dominant biomedical model of mental health care has led to over-reliance on psychiatric drugs and neglect of effective social, community and relational approaches. This approach fails to address the underlying social, economic and psychological determinants of mental distress and is contributing to worsening outcomes,” the report says.
The report contains nine specific recommendations which would amount to a “paradigm shift” in mental health care that could “improve mental health outcomes, reduce the rising economic burden of poor mental health and promote overall societal health and well-being.”
The nine recommendations are:
Services
- Boost provision for social interventions including social prescribing
- Fund community-based mental health hubs for all ages
- Fund drug deprescribing services as well as a national withdrawal support helpline
- Reverse rates of unnecessary antidepressant prescribing
Regulation
- Reform the MHRA, the regulator of medicines in the UK
- Implement a UK Sunshine Act to improve transparency of conflicts of interest in medicine
Education
- Integrate Social and Emotional Learning programmes within the national curriculum
- Improve the education and training of health professionals
Public and professional awareness
- De-medicalise mental health language
However, in their conclusion the group stresses that changes can not come from the government alone, stating that the challenge “requires everyone involved in the UK mental health system to play an active part.”
