More and more children are being harmed by the reckless and ever-increasing prescribing of anti-depressants to children

How do we tackle the rise in the number of children on anti-depressants? - Independent

Personally, I'd make it illegal for doctors to prescribe antidepressants or any other psychotropic junk (like ritalin, say) to children, and impose severe sanctions on any who then issued such prescriptions to children, including having the doctor automatically and permanently barred from dealing with children in any capacity as a doctor.

I don't buy the claim that doctors are merely responding to pressure from parents. - Nonsense! - Too many doctors have become drug-pushers for BigPharma, to the great detriment of the nation's health and happiness.

Research commissioned by MIND, the mental health charity, indicates that a walk in the country is more effective at reducing depression than antidepressants are; their benefit is small if any, their adverse effects are many, and very serious, and very common. - It is a pity they are prescribed at all; and patients are rarely warned about them. - And as you will see in the extract below, the drug companies cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their damaging products, which ruin so many lives.

Extract from the article:

"When Stephen Bailey was eight years old, he was prescribed Librium by his doctor. That was the beginning of a 24-year addiction to mind-altering drugs which, Bailey says, changed the course of his life and saw him descend into a world of fits, screaming and violence whenever he tried to withdraw. A commonly-used tranquilliser, Librium is one of the benzodiazepine family, and was prescribed to calm Bailey after he suffered from migraines and flashing lights in response to a routine set of vaccinations.

"I became absolutely petrified of the world, full of terror, in particular that I would swallow my tongue," says Bailey. "It felt like my mind was controlled by something else and I retreated into my own world. They affected my thinking in every way. I felt like I was chemically lobotomised."

Because of stories such as this, Librium, Valium and other member of the benzodiazepine family, are now not routinely prescribed to children. But that doesn't mean we have stopped medicating our children – far from it. New figures released last month show that in the past decade the number of prescriptions for mind-altering drugs, including anti-depressants such as Prozac, given to children under the age of 16 has more than quadrupled. Last year, there were more than 631,000 cases of drugs such as these given for mental health problems. In the mid 1990s, this figure was 146,000.

This increase is in spite of guidelines from Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) that GPs should offer three months of " talking therapy" before reaching for the prescription pad.

The issue was highlighted by the case of Mollie Murphy, who last year was prescribed a course of anti-depressants at the age of four after she became distraught at being separated from her friends when she failed to get a place at her local school. "We are in danger of not having learnt from the benzodiazepine story," says child psychiatrist Dr Mike Shooter, chairman of the children's mental health charity Young Minds. "People saying we're going through the same cycle with anti-depressants. The prescription rate is rising fast, and it worries me."

According to Dr Shooter, the reasons for the dramatic increase in prescriptions are complex. "One factor is the pharmaceutical companies marketing these drugs as happiness in the form of a pill," he says. " In the process they have concealed the fact that they don't actually bring happiness. There is also controversy at the moment about drug companies concealing lack of effectiveness." Dr Shooter believes that young people are increasingly turning to doctors with problems of life rather than actual depression. "The demand for a diagnosis is great," he says. "The greater the pressure the GP is under, the greater the temptation to reach for the prescription pad."

According to a Unicef report published earlier this year, the UK is now one of the least happy places for a young person to be brought up in the whole of western Europe. "There are more socio-economic problems facing children these days than there have ever been," says Dr Shooter. " I've worked in areas where there's a lot of family breakdown, alcohol abuse, violence and so on. It's pretty desperate, and young people living in these situations can be miserable. Half the kids I saw would satisfy the criteria of ADHD or depression – but they were just reacting behaviourally to the mess they lived in. The answer is not a pill." "