Suffering depression? Get out an exercise. "Exercise for mild to moderate depression has pretty equal effects to therapy or medications which is pretty powerful," states Dr. Nicholas Fabiano, a psychiatry resident who wrote a paper exploring this question."If you're choosing not to prescribe it because you don't know how to prescribe exercise, you can imagine that might be an element of malpractice.""The same way that if you went to your psychiatrist with symptoms of depression and said, 'I want to start an antidepressant', and they said, 'I don't know how to do that', you would probably be pretty shocked to hear that," he says.Why isn't exercise not prescribed more for depression? Check out the video below to find out....Fabiano says exercise has multi-system benefits, stating "exercise has benefits beyond just the mental health benefit and usually it's actually prescribed for non mental health reasons.""Things like weight, glycemic control or diabetes, even some cardiovascular conditions, obviously there's contraindications for some people that may be higher risk, but it can help with your heart, all these different organ systems in your body.""And we know that people with depression are unfairly burdened by these conditions.""So having an intervention that can tackle both makes a lot of sense," Fabiano points out. .This is because as Fabiano states in his paper, there is an increasing number of people documented with depression, with over 290,000 people documented globally in 2019. Many of these individuals experience one of the following: "risk of numerous physical diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure, among others."This is why exercise has "multi-system benefits" and why Fabiano mentioned, "Recent meta-analyses have demonstrated that exercise has anti-depressant effects comparable to those of medications or psychotherapy."Further, exercise may also be beneficial due to the average prescription of medications and/or psychotherapy is not being effective in a"considerable portion of the population (30%–50%)."."As such, exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in guidelines for depression globally with good acceptability and safety."The only problem is however, "exercise is uncommonly prescribed or prioritised in the psychiatric setting."Why is this exactly?"In terms of barriers, we don't have direct referral pathways to get someone exercising." "It's common for people to say, 'just go outside and run,' and people know that too.""They don't need the doctor to tell them that, they need support to get that going, whether that be having a trainer, whether that be having some other sort of supervision during exercise or some clear guidance," Fabiano states.."It would be great if I could write something on a piece of paper."It would be great if they had "a trainer that's paid for by insurance or a gym membership that's paid for them by insurance, similar to that a medication would be," Fabiano states. Want to hear more? Click here to watch the full clip.
