POPULAR antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft are being dished out to people with a much wider range of problems than the patients the drugs were originally tested on.
A team at Rhode Island Hospital looked at the criteria used to select subjects for clinical trials of antidepressants reported between 1994 and 1998. They then applied the same criteria to over 300 psychiatric outpatients at the hospital. Only about 15 per cent of them would have been eligible for the antidepressant trials, they found, yet 94 per cent were prescribed the drugs within three months.
The outpatients had all been…
