**Medication** Antidepressants

[brianmackenna]

For work assessing mental health in OpenSAFELY it would be good to have a reusable list of antidepressants. I think the best strategy is to create a separate codelist for each class of antidepressants. The BNF section on antidepressants has a fairly well defined list that does the bulk of the work BUT I think this list should only include medicines where it is likely being used as an antidepressant. Off top of my head there are a couple of meds which are maybe more thought of as antipsychotics in the BNF list.

Amitriptyline in particular is more commonly used for pain - we could exclude low dose preps are being used for pain or we could include all and use a additional codelist to tease out whats for depression v pain. I'm writing quickly but when list is being built someone needs to give thought to pros/cons and after discussion this particular decision should be clearly documented in methodology.

[brianmackenna]

@a-d-brown is going to help us out with this

[a-d-brown]

Thanks Brian. Agree it would be valuable to have a distinct codelist for each class. I'll make a start on preparing these codelists and will create a separate issue for each class as they become ready.