Antidepressants and Age in 27 European Countries: Evidence of a U-Shape in Human Well-being Through Life

Some researchers suggest that human well-being is U-shaped through our lives. If it exists, such a curve could be classified as a truly fundamental discovery about humans. Yet sceptics point to the difficulty of relying on questions in which people are asked to describe subjective feelings – and the result is then an impasse. This paper suggests a way to try to break that intellectual deadlock. We deliberately eschew information on well-being. Instead, we draw upon data on the use of antidepressants in randomized samples from 27 European countries. Such data are surprisingly little-studied by social scientists. We show that the probability of taking antidepressants follows an inverted U-shape curve that peaks in people‟s late 40s. This result -a new one across various research fields -is an important one because it is strikingly consistent with the life-course claims made in the literature on subjective well-being.