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Antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs provide so little benefit that doctors could stop writing 98 per cent of all prescriptions without causing harm, a Danish expert argues this week in a leading medical journal piece that has renewed the debate around fast-growing prescriptions of mood-altering drugs.

Dr. Peter Gotzsche argues in the British Medical Journal that flawed and biased industry-funded drug trials have overplayed the benefits and understated the deaths from antidepressants, tranquilizers and antipsychotics.

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Canadian leaders in psychiatry call the claims misleading, misguided and dangerous. But Gotzsche calculates that psychiatric drugs contribute to the deaths “of more than half a million people” aged 65 and older in the Western world alone, including deaths due to suicide.

“Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this,” he writes in the BMJ, “but they are minimal.”