More than one in every six medical card holders in the State is on anti-depressants, according to new figures from the Department of Health.
There are over a million medical card holders in the State and the figures indicate some 200,000 of them were prescribed anti-depressants in 2002.
When private patients are included, the number of people prescribed anti-depressants in 2002 was 300,000.
The Department of Health figures also indicate prescriptions for the drugs have more than doubled between 1993 and 2002, to a total of 1½ million. The data was presented in an RTÉ Prime Time programme last night.
It claimed sales of anti-depressants in the Republic had grown an average of 22 per cent a year between 2000 and 2002, one and a half times as fast as the global growth over the same period. It said €50 million was spent on antidepressants and mood stabilisers in the State in 2002, up €42 million since 1993.
The programme looked at whether Irish doctors were prescribing anti-depressants too readily and whether they were influenced in doing so by the close relationship between them and drug companies, which regularly pay for them to attend conferences abroad.
A study of a nationally representative sample of 100 GPs by the programme found the doctors were evenly divided on whether talk therapy or medication was the best way to treat mild depression. Yet when Prime Time sent a young man to visit 15 GPs around the country with just three of the minimum of five symptoms which should, according to WHO guidelines, be present before doctors consider medication, the man was prescribed antidepressants by 14 of the doctors.
Prof Tom O'Dowd, professor of general practice at TCD, said counselling services were inadequate and often doctors relied on medication.
When asked about the relationship between drug companies and doctors, and his view of Pfizer taking 60 doctors from Munster to see their rugby team play in the Heineken Cup in France, he said that for drug companies to take doctors away "on those kind of expensive trips is bribery" and both sides were "naive or even worse if they think it's not influential".
Pfizer said the main purpose of the trip was a conference on heart disease. It said the hospitality was entirely secondary.
Of the GPs surveyed for the programme, just over 30 per cent said they believed drug company sponsorship could have any influence on them. But nearly 60 per cent felt it could influence their colleagues.
Prof O'Dowd said it was foolish to think such trips did not influence doctors. "I mean the research evidence is there to show that we are influenced by the goodies and perks that we receive, and doctors will always say that I'm not influenced by it, but of course we all are. We are all very human," he said.