admin A new study has suggested physical exercise as a natural way to treat patients with mental health and mood disorders – from anxiety and depression to schizophrenia, suicidality and acute psychotic episodes.
“The general attitude of medicine is that you treat the primary problem first, and exercise was never considered to be a life or death treatment option. Now that we know it’s so effective, it can become as fundamental as pharmacological intervention,” described David Tomasi, a psychotherapist and inpatient psychiatry group therapist at the University of Vermont Medical Center and the lead researcher of the study.
Practitioners at inpatient psychiatric facilities – often crowded, acute settings in which patients experience severe distress and discomfort – typically prescribe psychotropic medications first, rather than natural remedies like physical exercise, to alleviate patients’ symptoms such as anger, anxiety and depression.
Indeed, Tomasi estimated that only a handful of inpatient psychiatric hospitals in the United States give psychotherapist-supported gym facilities exclusively for these patients. Instead, practitioners rely on classical psychotherapeutic and pharmacological frameworks to treat psychiatric symptoms, which they monitor to determine when a patient is ready to be discharged from the facility.
Tomasi built a gym exclusively for around 100 patients in the medical center’s inpatient psychiatry unit and led and introduced 60-minute structured exercise and nutrition education programs into their treatment plans. The psychotherapists surveyed patients on their mood, self-esteem, and self-image both before and after the exercise sessions to gauge the effects of exercise on psychiatric symptoms.
Patients reported lower levels of anger, anxiety, and depression, higher self-esteem, and overall improved moods.
Tomasi discovered an average of 95 percent of patients reported that their moods improved after doing the structured exercises, while 63 percent of the patients reported being happy or very happy, as opposed to neutral, sad or very sad, after the exercises. An average of 91.8 percent of patients also reported that they were pleased with the way their bodies felt after doing the structured exercises.
“The fantastic thing about these results is that, if you’re in a psychotic state, you are sort of limited with what you can do in terms of talk therapy or psychotherapy. It’s hard to receive a message through talk therapy in that state, whereas with exercise, you can use your body and not rely on emotional intelligence alone,” described Tomasi.
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