The results, recently published in The Lancet, offer fresh evidence of how rapidly expanding treatment options are changing psychiatry and care.
Antonio Uphal, of University College London, said: “The next stage of research will be to further expand these studies, and assess all the medicines currently used for depression and other mood disorders and what present, where, and with best care.”David Gifford, of the Wellcome Trust Cambridge Institute, said: “This latest study suggests that the treatment for depression continues to be poor, and these findings confirm our previous work in 2017.
“The drugs currently in use for treating major depressive disorder are mood stabilizers.
They have shown promise in the trials we undertook, but: in practice, we are seeing a prolonged duration of high levels of these drugs in patients with borderline personality disorder.
Deletion has also emerged from a large research project funded by NIMH’s Innovational Medicines and Drug Therapy Research Centre, known as the World Mental Health Network, which has assessed the use of over 13,000 psychotherapies and drugs in applications from unknown prescribers around the world.
Despite relatively widespread use worldwide, the trials and meta-analyses required to support these drug efats are not all sufficient and often not conclusive in their findings.