Separation of anxiety and depressive disorders

doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7419.870-a

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Authors' reply

Peter Tyrer, head of department (p.tyrer@imperial.ac.uk),
Edward Shorter, professor of the history of medicine

¹Department of Psychological Medicine, Imperial College Faculty of Medicine, St Mary's Campus, London W2 1PD
²History of Medicine Programme, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 1VJ

EDITOR—Our article merely points to an inefficiency in drug development that seems to be driven by commercial imperatives, and as the targets are phoney diagnoses no advance is made. If we merely promote new indications for old drugs and dump existing compounds when they lose their patents is it surprising that depression and anxiety remain such major causes of morbidity?

Weeks is right to assert that …