In an antique shop in Grantown in Spey I came across a 1978 edition of ‘The Scottish Pharmacist’. Some of the articles made me laugh out loud but also led to a deeper consideration of where prescribing in Scotland has come in the forty years that have passed since.
It is now the case that nearly 1 in 5 Scots are taking an antidepressant. This meets the criteria for “mass prescribing”. Yet the Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland has stated that he does not think that this represents over-prescribing.
This post carries some of the material that I came across in ‘The Scottish Pharmacist’ of 1978. I have interspersed among this material some of the words of Gabriel García Márquez, Penelope Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Tomas Tranströmer and Margaret Drabble.
