Case presentation - Antidepressant Prescribing

Imagine you've set a target to reduce antidepressant prescribing and everyone expects you to do it. What you really need to do is show graphs going down, since no-one likes graphs that go up when you've said they'll go down.

Have a look at the following graphs. Click on the images to get larger graphs.

Which one is better? Which one would you like to use to demonstrate that antidepressant prescribing is going down?

Most people would choose the second one, because the graph goes down, right?

Wrong. The second one actually reflects a higher level of antidepressant prescribing in 2008 than the first? By choosing exactly when you start to measure, and depending on how high your baseline is, you can reflect whatever you want to show.

If you don't believe us, download the data in Excel format, and see for yourself.

Interested readers might want to check out other examples where the data might not be all that they seem. For example, Anscombe's quartet.

We excel at making sure that the data fit your graph, and not the other way around.