According to clinical guidelines, external<\/a>, children should be assessed by a psychiatrist before they are prescribed antidepressants.<\/p>\nHowever, Gloucestershire GP Tom Sutherland said “skyrocketing demand” for young people’s mental health services meant some doctors felt forced to prescribe medication outside of those guidelines.<\/p>\n
“GPs often find themselves in a really difficult situation where [a patient’s] access to that specialist will be 18 months or two years away,” Sutherland added.<\/p>\n
“They’re forced into a position where they can either not prescribe that medication, and there’s a potential harm there to the patient by being left untreated, or they can act outside of guidance and initiate that medication.<\/p>\n
“There’s no good choice for GPs in the system as it is at the moment.”<\/p>\n
Sutherland said patients at his surgery were never prescribed antidepressants in isolation and were referred to support services while they waited to see specialists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 70,000 under-18s are prescribed antidepressants each year, BBC analysis of NHS England figures shows. According to clinical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[103,61,60,371],"class_list":{"0":"post-366623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-medication"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}