GPs could face stricter controls on their powers to prescribe antidepressants and drugs like benzodiazepines as part of a new mental health strategy published this week.
One of the 15 “deliverables” in Public Health Jersey’s Connected in Hope: A Strategy for Suicide Prevention in Jersey 2025-29 is a commitment to strengthening controls on medication, with a focus on prescribing of benzodiazepines, a class of antidepressant, and polypharmacy, the practice of using multiple prescription drugs at the same time.
Studies in the UK have suggested links between some antidepressants and increasing suicide rates, although health officials in Jersey say that the numbers on the Island are “tiny”.
“Success will be evidenced by a reduction in suicides and suicide attempts linked to prescribed medication, particularly antidepressants and polypharmacy,” the report says.
Health did not provide data on how many people in the Island were currently were currently on antidepressants, but statistics from 2021 – the last year for which they were available –
revealed that the number of patients prescribed antidepressants had risen by 18% over the last six years.
A total of 13,100 people were on antidepressants in 2021, 8,700 of them women and 4,400 men. The JEP has requested figures for benzodiazepines specifically from Health.
Meanwhile, a total of 6,800 were on hypnotics or anxiolytics, used to treat anxiety, with 4,200 women and 2,700 men. In 2020, 14% of the population of England was on antidepressants, compared to 13% in Jersey.
Commenting ahead of the release of the report, Andy Weir, Jersey’s director of mental health, said that his department was “looking at” the prescribing of benzodiazepines.
“It is really high here,” he said.
“One of the actions in the plan is working differently with GPs, [and thinking] about prescribing and [who needs it].
“If they’re clinically depressed, they need an antidepressant as well as some talking therapy, but you have to think about risk and how you manage risk.”
He recalled how in the 1970s, GPs were over-prescribing valium to women to the extent that it became known as “mother’s little helper”.
“When I trained, we were looking after women that were coming off valium who had become addicted to it […]. So there is sometimes an over reliance on medicine.”
Mr Weir stressed that while antidepressants were useful in treating depression, they had to be combined with therapy. “All the guidance around depression says you have to do both,” he said. A recent study of 8,000 coroner’s reports published by the University of East London in 2023 found that over 6,000 deaths by suicide in England and Wales were linked to antidepressants.
The author of the study, Dr John Reed, professor of clinical psychology, at UEL said: “Not only do antidepressants not reduce suicidality, but they also actually increase it for many, and for some they provide the mechanism for killing oneself.”
A survey by the same professor in 2018 found that 50% of people who were taking antidepressants reported suicidal thoughts after taking the drugs, and 60% noticed a reduction in positive feelings.
Asked about the links, Mr Weir said that there was “no evidence at all that we have a specific issue in Jersey of people dying by suicide by using either of these types of drugs – the number is tiny over recent years.”
Jersey’s suicide prevention strategy was commissioned after the result of a serious case review by Dr Paul Myatt in 2022, which made damning criticisms of mental health provision when it comes to suicide and called for mental health training to be mandatory for all health staff, as in the UK.
The Myatt review came after an uptick in deaths by suicide in 2022, to 14 from six a year earlier. In 2025, so far at least three people – all middle-aged men – have ended their lives in 2025.
The government stresses that suicide statistics are not final because causes of death are confirmed during an inquest.
Benzodiazepines are a class of depressant drugs, often called “benzos,” prescribed to treat anxiety, insomnia and seizures, working by enhancing the effects of the neurotransmitter GABA.
