Women Report Depression Diagnosis at Twice the Rate of Men, as Doctor Claims Britain Is Over-Diagnosing the Nation

Women in Britain are almost twice as likely as men to report having been diagnosed with depression, according to an analysis published by Our Future Health in 2025, a disparity that has resurfaced as a prominent doctor argues that Britain is experiencing an 'epidemic' of psychiatric diagnoses and antidepressant prescribing.

The Our Future Health analysis, based on more than 1.5 million questionnaires in June 2025, found that 20.5 per cent of women reported a depression diagnosis against 12.3 per cent of men. Women were also nearly twice as likely to report anxiety, at 18.2 per cent compared with 10 per cent for men.

Doctor Claims Diagnostic Criteria Are Too Broad

The gender disparity has resurfaced just as Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish specialist in internal medicine and member of the UK-based Critical Psychiatry Network, argues that psychiatric diagnoses in Britain are being handed out far too readily.

Writing on Mad in America, Gøtzsche said psychiatric diagnostic criteria are so broad that most people could easily qualify for one or more diagnoses. He cited his own lecture audiences, saying between one quarter and one half typically test positive on an adult ADHD questionnaire, though such a test is not equivalent to a clinical diagnosis.

Gøtzsche is not a psychiatrist but has written extensively and critically about psychiatry for years. His article reproduces and comments on an earlier piece by psychiatrist Derek Summerfield, who raised similar concerns in the BMJ in 2018.

Summerfield wrote that the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the media routinely cite an 'epidemic' of mental disorder affecting one in four people in the UK, describing such claims as 'disease mongering' that had become 'unexamined societal truisms'.

Old NHS Figures Resurface

The article also revisits historical NHS prescribing figures showing that antidepressant prescription items dispensed in England rose from around nine million in the 1990s to 64.7 million in 2016, with a reported direct NHS cost of about £266 million that year.

The figures are close to a decade old. The 64.7 million figure comes from NHS data on prescriptions dispensed in the community in England and predates Summerfield's 2018 BMJ article, which cited the figures, so they should not be treated as new NHS data or as figures covering the whole of Britain.

Gøtzsche goes further, arguing that psychiatric drugs 'are not targeted at all and none of them can cure people'. He also argues that the simple theory that depression is caused by low serotonin levels has been discredited, citing psychiatrist David Healy's description of the idea as the 'marketing of a myth'.

A 2022 systematic umbrella review in Molecular Psychiatry challenged the 'chemical imbalance' explanation of depression, finding no consistent evidence that the condition is associated with lowered serotonin activity or concentration.

The biology of depression and the mechanisms through which antidepressants work are more complex than a simple serotonin deficiency model suggests.

Gøtzsche has also argued that antidepressants 'double suicides', a claim based on his interpretation of previously published evidence. The claim is disputed and should not be treated as an established finding, and the precise outcome matters, since suicidal behaviour, suicidal thoughts and completed suicide are distinct outcomes.

A Separate Picture on Gender

Crucially, neither Gøtzsche nor Summerfield's original article makes a specific claim about why women report depression diagnoses more often than men. The gender gap comes from separate research, not from their commentary on psychiatric diagnosis, and the two strands should not be read as making the same argument.

Data from England supports the broader pattern. Mental health charity Mind reports that 24 per cent of women experience a common mental health problem in any given week, compared with 15 per cent of men, though those figures relate to England rather than Britain or the UK as a whole.

There are several possible factors associated with differences in mental health between people, including socioeconomic disadvantage and traumatic experiences.

However, the available figures do not establish that any single factor explains the gender gap.

The figures raise a genuine tension for British healthcare. If Gøtzsche's argument about overdiagnosis holds any weight, it sits awkwardly alongside the wider evidence on mental health problems among women.

The Our Future Health figures cannot establish whether the higher rate of reported diagnoses reflects overdiagnosis, greater prevalence of depression, greater willingness to seek help, differences in access to care, or a combination of these factors. Nor do they establish that women are more likely than men to be overdiagnosed.

They show a difference in self-reported lifetime diagnoses, while Gøtzsche makes a separate argument about the breadth of diagnostic criteria. Getting the balance wrong in either direction — dismissing genuine distress or medicalising it unnecessarily — carries real consequences for patients and NHS budgets.