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Guernsey's doctors wrote nearly 90,000 prescriptions for antidepressants last year.
The most popular was Sertraline, at nearly 30,000 prescriptions while patients were also prescribed Citalopram, Fluoxetine, Venlafaxine, and Mirtazapine.
All of those medications can be prescribed for other medical matters too but their primary purpose is to treat depression. Most of them come under a group of medicines known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
While the number of prescriptions issued is into five figures, the number of patients taking the medication sits at just under 7000 people - which is just over one tenth of the island's population.
Pictured: The 2023 Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy Annual Report can be read in full HERE.
The prescription numbers were revealed in the first Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy Annual Report, produced to reflect the work carried out by the Strategy between 2023 and 2029, and published earlier this week.
The Mental Health and Wellbeing Steering group had agreed to monitor the prescribing activity for these drugs and will compare them to data produced on an annual basis going forward. That will ensure any trends of change in usage can be identified and monitored.
At nearly 90,000 prescriptions combined during 2023, the prescription level of these five anti depressants represents less than a fifth of all medications prescribed in Guernsey over the course of a year.
The 2022 Prescribing Support Unit Annual Report - released in October last year - showed that 1.6million prescriptions were written during 2022.
This was an increase of 1.2% on 2021, with the cost of the pharmacy service, including fees and minus prescription charges paid by patients, coming to £21.77 million, up 0.5% on 2021.
Of the total number of medications prescribed during 2022, 118, 872 were categorised as anti-depressants, but unlike the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy report, it does not specify brand names so it may have included other medications too.
Sertraline, Citalopram, Fluoxetine, and Venlafaxine are all selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, while Mirtazapine works to impact serotonin and norepinephrine systems in the brain but is not a reuptake inhibitor.
They are all taken predominantly in tablet form, once per day.
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