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Media coverage of SSRI prescribing is notably polarized.

Some outlets present a complex picture with nuance, detailing what isn’t known.

Others, with notable similarity, talk of a “war” against antidepressants.

Over the past week, media outlets from The New York Times to Men’s Health, and Psychiatric News to Psychiatric Times, have weighed in on efforts to tackle the continuing rise in the prescribing of antidepressants in the United States and draw attention to safer ways of ending treatment when desired.

In “Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About SSRIs,” a revealing panel hosted midweek by The New York Times, discussion centered on withdrawal problems, short- and longer-term harms, and why antidepressants remain widely prescribed when their exact mechanism—and precise outcome—is still not known.

With almost 1 in 6 Americans prescribed a course of treatment, roughly 70 percent of them for two years or longer, panelists considered whether overtreatment by SSRIs is helping or hurting national trends in mental health. If helping, why do long-term outcomes with SSRIs as first-line treatment show such limited gains, yet continued problems with weight gain, sexual dysfunction, and withdrawal?

A “war” on antidepressants or an overdue push to factor in all evidence?

Addressing the same concerns from a pro-medicine perspective, Men’s Health contributor psychiatrist Gregory Scott Brown insisted, “Antidepressants aren’t the problem.” Efforts to clarify what is driving prescribing rates ever higher apparently were. The push by Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for tighter diagnoses, more-stringent prescribing, expanded treatment options, and wider adoption of safer deprescribing programs amounted to a fresh crisis: “The War on Antidepressants Has Officially Arrived.”

Psychiatric News had already dated the........

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