Ill-health and social predictors of psychotropic drug prescription in general practice.

Prescriptions of psychotropic drugs among 505 consecutive attenders on a single day at 32 general practices were recorded. For 404 of them the results of a screening for psychiatric morbidity conducted by means of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) were available. Among attenders recognised as psychiatric cases by their general practitioners the presence of concurrent somatic problems exerted a significant effect in reducing the relative odds of prescription. A very strong and significant interaction effect between male sex and high GHQ score was detected: men scoring over the threshold on the questionnaire had a risk of receiving a psychotropic drug prescription 49 times higher than the general sample. Social problems-related factors did not show significant effects when included in multivariate models comprising ill-health risk factors.