The recent outcry about the massive rise in numbers of prescriptions for anti-depressants for people of all ages raised memories for me, working as a young doctor. It seems that every generation of doctors has to make afresh the mistakes made by the previous one.

Thirty years ago we thought we had settled the argument about whether we should treat depression with drugs. Now the argument has been revived.

My own slant on the subject is very clear. As a student I worked as a nursing assistant in a long-stay mental hospital, and saw the devastation that untreated depression wrought on people. In the years after we had effective anti-depressant drugs, the hospital wards emptied, suicide rates fell, and so many people who had given up hope of ever being able to rejoin society were able to return to their families and to work.

So I am unashamedly biased in favour of giving an effective anti-depressant drug to any person who needs one, and who is likely to benefit from it. And I would be happy to give it regularly for two years or more if necessary.

There is one proviso - that while prescribing the medicine I would also try to help the person with psychological advice, including a system called cognitive behaviour therapy, that many doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists now know well. The two work well together.

So why is there such a fuss about anti-depressant drugs? The people who are against them argue, reasonably, that most cases of depression aren't a true illness, but the result of poverty, unemployment, marital and money worries, grief and loneliness, and no pills can reverse them. Their solution is to solve the social and other problems that are causing the depression and it will lift itself.

Unfortunately the world just doesn't seem to work like that. No doctor can wave a magic wand to change society or to solve the underlying problems that are making their patients unhappy.

But we can try to help them understand their depression and to find better ways of thinking about their lives and how to live them. That's how cognitive behaviour therapy works.

That's why we use it when we can to correct things. However, it takes time to make a difference, and sometimes we don't have that time. When patients are desperate we need to give them something practical to help, too. That's where anti-depressant drugs come in.

Some of us, including me, feel that they do help a lot. Others aren't so sure. I often wonder, when I read their views, if they would still hold them had they been in my shoes those years ago, in that awful mental hospital?

So I'm not alarmed, as some newspaper writers have been, by the increase in prescriptions for anti-depressants.

Earlier this year there were concerns that some trials had reported a slight increase in suicide attempts in teenagers given anti-depressants. The claim has been taken very seriously, and all British doctors have been asked to take particular care, and to monitor closely the mood, of any young person put on them.

Since then in trials of anti-depressant use in the young there have been no suicides and even a fall in the tendency to talk about self-harm in those given one of the drugs.

The decision to give anyone, including a teenager, an anti-depressant, is never taken lightly. It is just one of several ways in which we can help people climb out of depression.

To forbid us from prescribing them, as has been proposed by some campaigners, would be to take a very useful arm of treatment from us - and would put a lot of people at risk.

Surely no-one wants us to go back to the time when only psychotherapy and counselling were available - and there were so many people with active depression that there was never enough time for them all to be given the proper care.

Those old mental hospitals were formidable places. We would never go back to them. But without being able to give anti-depressants I fear that we would be travelling backwards, not forwards, in our progress towards better treatment for everyone with this devastating illness.