The study includes drugs like beta-blockers, prescription strength ibuprofen, and birth control pills, but stops short of saying that these definitely cause symptoms of depression in otherwise healthy individuals on their own. The real danger occurs when prescriptions are mixed. It's perfectly normal for people to need more than one medication to help them with their health issues but Qato's finding suggest that when drugs are mixed, their side effects can be compounded.
Interestingly, the percentage of drugs which list depression or suicidal thoughts as symptoms–here's a list of over 200 from the New York Times– has been steadily creeping up over the past decade, from 35% in 2005 to 38.4% in 2014. In the same period, the percentage of adults concurrently taking three or more drugs rose from 6.9% to 9.5% and the usage of medications that list suicidal thoughts and depression as side effects has increased from 17.3% to 23.5%. To a layman or (very) ametuer logician, it's easy to extrapolate a cause and effect relationship from this data, but Qato advises against this, as the data's meaning isn't completely clear. What is clear, however, is that suicide rates have been steadily increasing since the beginning of the 21st century.
Dr. Philip Muskin, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia and secretary of the American Psychiatric Association suggests that the information in Qato's study, while not definitive, should be enough to warn doctors that their prescription pad can be a dangerous and unwieldy tool. The hope is that medical professionals will not hand out drugs like ibuprofen willy-nilly but rather take their side effects into account and discuss these side effects with their patients before prescribing.
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