In the wake of a study showing antidepressants worked no better than placebo in most patients, the UK released details of a $340 million plan to train more than 3,600 psychological therapists, The Guardian reports.

About 900,000 more people will be treated for depression and anxiety under the plan, according to the UK’s Department of Health, which predicts that 450,000 of them will be completely cured. The department also believes that 25,000 fewer people will claim sick pay and benefits because of mental health problems. The program is called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies.

The study published in PLoS revealed that SSRI antidepressants performed no better than placebo in the earliest trials in the 1980s. No such analysis has been done before because of the reluctance of drugmakers to hand over the full trial results, the paper notes. The researchers - who, by the way, are psychologists - obtained complete data for all the trials submitted to the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act, including unpublished data.

Tim Kendall, joint director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, which put together the guidelines for the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellent, or NICE, tells the paper that if they had been asked to approve the SSRIs on the basis of the latest study, they would have turned them down because of their ineffectiveness. Nice is currently reviewing its advice on the drugs.

Mental health groups say docs have had no choice but to prescribe drugs because of the shortage of therapists, even though the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommends that therapy should be tried before drugs are prescribed. “Nine out of 10 general practitioners say they’ve been forced to dish out drugs because they don’t have proper access to ‘talking treatments’ such as cognitive behavioural therapy,” Alison Cobb, policy officer at the Mind charity, tells the paper.

In 2006, more than 31 million scrips for antidepressants were written in the UK, the charity says, of which 16.2 million were for SSRIs. “The doctors, the patients and campaigners like us have been telling government for years: spend NHS money on talking therapies and don’t just pour it into drugs. Some people do benefit from anti-depressants, but they want talking therapies too,” Paul Corry, of Rethink, tells The Guardian.

Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, notes that 60 percent of general practitioners had offered some sort of counselling for several years, but there were time limits and restrictions.