Antidepressant Medication: A Case Study

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Depression is a common word people mention many times whenever they’re feeling a bit down. And sadly, many people decide to take antidepressant medication to deal with the problems their dealing with on a day to day basis. People that don’t really suffer from depression are able to obtain antidepressant medication for ‘‘depression’’. And Dr. Jeffrey Cain, the president of the Academy of Family Physicians suggests that it’s either ‘‘a psychiatrist, non- psychiatrist physician or other provider, like a nurse practitioner misdiagnosing patients’’ (p.6). It seems that medical professionals aren’t following and meeting the criteria for depression presented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or D.S.M. The D.S.M which is mentioned to be ‘‘psychiatrists’ bible’’ (Rabin, 2013, p.5) that maintains and classify mental disorders and the criteria. For depression, a person is positioned to be diagnosed with depression if their depress mood continues on for at least two weeks and has at least five symptoms that comes along with depression (Rabin, 2013, p.6). Such as, ‘‘unintentional weight gain or loss, problems sleeping, agitation, or slowed reactions noticed by others, fatigue and low energy, feelings of excessive guilt or worthlessness, difficulty concentrating, and recurrent thoughts of death’’ (Rabin, 2013, p.6). …show more content…

The first study that is presented in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomtics had more than 5,000 patients that was two-thirds of their sample group that didn’t meet the criteria (Rabin, 2013, p.5). And the second study had 5,639 test subjects diagnosed with depression, and Dr. Dr. Ramin Mojtabai, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (2013) mentions how only about 38 percent of the people meet the D.S.M criteria

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