Exercise as antidepressant treatment: Time for the transition from trials to clinic?

The notion that exercise may hold promise as an intervention to treat mental health problems has a history of over 30years. As early as 1984, the National Institute of Mental Health organized a workshop entitled “Coping with mental stress: The potential and limits of exercise intervention” [1]. Since then, this notion has been controversial. In the early days, neither the amount nor the quality of the experimental evidence could withstand serious scrutiny. Hughes [2], for example, after finding no exper imental evidence supporting any benefits of exercise for depression, anxiety, or cognitive function concluded that “the enthusiastic support of exercise to improve mental health has a limited empirical basis and lacks a well-tested rationale” (p.
Source: General Hospital Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Editorial Source Type: research