Use of antidepressants in the United States almost doubled from 1996 to 2005, and in 2005 antidepressants surpassed antihypertensives to become the most widely prescribed class of drugs in primary care and in hospital outpatient clinics, a study has found.

The study, by Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry (2009;66:848-56).

The authors compared sociodemographic and clinical patterns of antidepressant treatment between 1996 and 2005, using information from the household component of the 1996 and …