Depressing response by medics

Dr Adrian Brady (Letters, Apr 5) takes Niamh Drohan to task as she rumbled the patent prescription of anti-depressants to stressed and anxious students as seemingly de-rigeur among many medical GPs (“Depressing truth about treating depression in the young”, Apr 3).

The nature of Ms Drohan’s investigative modus operandum appears to spook Dr Brady a lot more than the content of her stark revelations, which, by any measure of decency, are both debilitating and damning. Perhaps he, and presumably many other GPs, are unsettled that their lazy convenience in reaching for the prescription pad has been exposed yet again.

The fact that she was able to elicit such a raft of anti-depressant medication posing “as a student from a local college suffering from stress and anxiety problems”, is a disturbing reality which warrants ever much more exposure and reformation. Stress and anxiety are regular, natural and normal responses to significant challenge and acute pressure of circumstance, such as impending college examinations. They require ameliorative choices drawn from a wide range of creative and supportive therapeutic options.