Background: It has been claimed that the advent of modern antidepressants has reduced the suicide rate.
Aims: To examine the correlation between the suicide rate and the prescription of antidepressants.
Method: A dynamic regression was employed to analyze a 73-month-long, monthly time series between 2010 and 2016 in Hungary. The independent variable was the Defined Daily Dose value for the number of antidepressant (AD) prescriptions filled each month.
Results: The models failed to show a significant association between the prescription of antidepressants and age- and sex-specific monthly suicide rates.
Conclusions: The prescription of antidepressants in Hungary has had no impact on suicide rates.
Keywords: Granger causality; antidepressants; autoregressive integrated moving average; dynamic regression; suicide.