“I wasn’t certain if I needed them, but I felt I owed it to myself,” explained a young woman regarding her decision to start taking antidepressants. Her words reflect a growing trend among her peers.

Her general practitioner prescribed the medication to help manage her premenstrual tension and fluctuating moods. She wondered why she should continue to struggle without them, especially when most of her friends were already using them. She feared she might be neglecting her own well-being by not following suit.

Her experience is part of a larger trend of increasing antidepressant usage among young people, a phenomenon amplified by social media content that often highlights the benefits while downplaying potential side effects.

In the UK, data indicates a significant rise in antidepressant prescriptions for individuals aged 15 to 29, with nearly a 33% increase from 2016 to 2023.

By 2023, approximately 1,846,533 individuals in this demographic were on antidepressants in England, with women comprising the majority of users.

A survey conducted by the teenage mental health charity Stem4 revealed that 43% of young adults aged 19 to 21 reported being prescribed antidepressants for mental health issues at some stage in their lives.

I fear antidepressants are becoming seen as an essential lifestyle aid, something people – young women, in particular – should aspire to take, as if they were a new diet.

Young female influencers on social media effuse about the drugs’ effects.

Alix Earle, who has 7.7 million followers on TikTok, disclosed that she is on antidepressant Lexapro for anxiety

 The antidepressant ‘literally changed so much for me’ said one. ‘I can’t believe how good it was’ said another. ‘I’m a better person because of it’.

They post videos of themselves proudly holding up bottles of pills, running to the mailbox to collect them and excitedly swallowing the tablets on camera.

They rarely mention the downsides of taking antidepressants.

These videos are shared by enthusiastic followers, who use cheeky-sounding hashtags that refer to commonly used antidepressants – such as #livelaughlexapro, #lexaprogirly and #zoloftgang – to make them sound appealing.

They reach billions of people worldwide. The TikTok hashtag #antidepressants has had more than 1.3 billion views.

This social media phenomenon was highlighted in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about antidepressants becoming a ‘hot lifestyle accessory’ – it also revealed how some of the influencers are sponsored by online health companies that attract people by offering quick and easy online assessments for mental health problems such as depression. (Medical providers on these sites, mainly based in the US, can then prescribe medication if it’s deemed necessary.)

The message is, why wouldn’t you take antidepressants if you are feeling a bit down or stressed?

It seems as if taking them is as easy and harmless as taking a multivitamin or eating more vegetables. You don’t have to ‘struggle in silence’ anymore, said one influencer.

Mackenzie Tidwell, 24, captioned a video ‘pretty girls take SSRIs’, a class of antidepressant

Of course, it is welcome that people are no longer afraid of stigma and able to be more open about their mental health problems.

However, this messaging implies two things about antidepressants that aren’t true: first, that they make people feel better; second, while they can have side-effects, they’re generally nothing to worry about.

Antidepressants are prescribed to treat mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety. But many people assume that because they are branded as antidepressants they must have some general uplifting effect.

As a psychiatrist who has seen hundreds of people who are taking antidepressants, I can tell you they don’t.

Studies with volunteers (people who don’t have a mental health problem) show that antidepressants either don’t have much immediately noticeable effect at all, or are experienced as unpleasant.

With continued use, some antidepressants can make people a bit groggy or lethargic. They also numb people’s emotions – which might sound appealing to someone who is acutely distressed, but many people find this effect unsettling.

And many antidepressants wreak havoc with your sex life.

Whether antidepressants improve symptoms is also uncertain.

Joanna Moncrieff is ‘not convinced these drugs are good for anyone’

In clinical trials, they are a little bit better than a placebo tablet at reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

In fact the data shows that people taking the placebo tablets improve almost as much as those taking the antidepressants.

What’s more, this small difference may be down to the fact that people in these trials can often guess whether they are getting the real drug or the placebo, due to side-effects.

This means people taking the real drug will get an extra psychological boost, which might account for the slim superiority of antidepressants.

There is a general consensus that antidepressants are not effective in mild depression. Based on my experience as a psychiatrist and knowledge of the research, I am not convinced these drugs are good for anyone.

And even in moderate or severe depression, guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) highlight that there are many effective alternatives to antidepressants, including talking therapies, exercise, social activities and guided self-help programmes, where a therapist helps you to work through self-help materials.

The most worrying aspect of the current trend, however, is the failure to highlight the significant side-effects of antidepressants.

On social media it’s only later, after the positive message has gone viral, that some of the influencers admit how the antidepressants had given them brain fog, made them gain weight – and sapped their emotion and libido.

And these effects didn’t just go away in a few days or weeks, as they said they’d been told by their prescriber.

Some of the influencers described severe withdrawal symptoms when they tried to stop antidepressants.

Withdrawal symptoms are more likely when people take these drugs long term, and the increasing number of people who remain on these drugs for years at a time are particularly vulnerable to these problems.

Persistent sexual dysfunction and emotional numbness have also been reported after people have stopped taking antidepressants. These can be devastating, especially for young people.

Many people struggle with their mental health. The fact that we are no longer burdened by the British stiff upper lip and can talk about our difficulties is progress. However, taking antidepressants is not a free lunch. It’s not even much of a lunch. Antidepressants are chemicals and taking chemicals has consequences.

There are other ways to improve your mood or manage your anxiety that are likely to have longer-lasting benefits with less risk.

• Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist based in London, a professor of critical and social psychiatry at University College London, and author of Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth (Flint).