Can exercise, diet and therapy help treat depression?

In my last blog I looked at whether natural supplements like St John’s wort can help in the treatment of depression. Today I want to explore whether exercise, diet and therapy help treat depression. However, I first want to remind you that depression is a serious illness. It is life-threatening, like cancer. If you have depression you need to seek professional help. You need to visit your doctor however you have every right to ask your doctor or psychiatrist if natural remedies might be a treatment option.

Exercise in treating depression

Researchers have found that exercise can be a ‘moderately helpful’ treatment for mild to moderate depression. Most studies showed that aerobic exercise such as running or walking for at least 30 minutes, three times a week, for at least eight weeks helped with depression. However this does not mean exercise can replace prescription anti-depressants, rather it helps people recover sooner.

Another study by the Black Dog Institute, UNSW Sydney and Western Sydney University has found exercise can prevent depression. The team processed data from 49 studies. Dr Joseph Firth from Western Sydney University said people who exercised regularly were 15 percent less likely to develop depression.

Harvard University has also carried out studies that has found exercise can help people with depression, high-intensity exercise releases the body's feel-good chemicals called endorphins, Harvard reported, resulting in the runner’s high that joggers feel. But for most people, the real value is in low-intensity exercise sustained over time. That kind of activity spurs the release of proteins called neurotrophic or growth factors, which cause nerve cells to grow and make new connections. The improvement in brain function makes you feel better.

Diet and depression

Prof Felice Jacka from Deakin University in Victoria last year released research which shows that people with moderate to severe depression can improve their mental health by eating a healthier diet. Prof Jacka has found people with unhealthy diet are more likely to be depressed. Professor Jacka’s team recruited 67 men and women with poor diets and moderate to severe depression. Half were put on a new healthy diet and half continued to eat bad food. After 12 weeks their mental health was checked and the people on the new improved diet had improved significantly. These people were not made to diet, just eat healthy food and it did wonders to improve their mental health.

What did the participants eat on their new diet? It was hardly radical. They ate whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, low-fat/unsweetened dairy, raw unsalted nuts, lean red meat, chicken, fish, eggs, and olive oil. They were discouraged from eating sweets, refined cereals, fried food, fast food and processed meat.

What is good about this diet? It is low in carbohydrates (sugar and flour). These cause surged in blood sugar, insulin and hormones, making you moody. The diet had good fats and cholesterol (like nuts and olive oil), which the brain needs work toproperly. It is low in processed oils like saturated fats and butter. These tilt the brain towards inflammation and away from healing. It contains meat, which has iron, zinc, and vitamin B 12. The take-out message from this study is that diet and depression are linked. Improving your diet is one way of combatting depression, but again have a good diet in conjunction with other treatments

Counselling to treat depression

A key part of treating depression is psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is the practice of spending time with a trained therapist, such as a psychologist or psychiatrist or professional counsellor to help diagnose and treat mental and emotional problems. A key therapy in the treatment of depression is cognitive behavioural therapy. This therapy tries to get the individual to turn away from dysfunctional emotions, behaviours, and thoughts and adopt new, healthier patterns of thinking and behaving. Unlike Freudian psychoanalysis it doesn’t make the patient probe their childhood to understand his or herself. Instead it asks the individual to look at their thinking and behaviour in the present and change destructive patterns. Freudian psychoanalysis can take years to pin point moments in childhood that set people on a course of unhealthy thinking. Cognitive behavioural therapy usually only runs over ten to twenty sessions.

The sessions provide opportunities to identify current life situations that may be causing or contributing to a person’s depression. You and your psychologist identify patterns of thinking or distorted perceptions that lead to depression. You may be asked to keep a journal. In the journal you record daily events and your reactions. Your psychologist can help recognise reactions and thought patterns that are self-defeating.

These include:

• all-or-nothing thinking: viewing the world in absolute, black-and-white terms
• disqualifying the positive: rejecting positive experiences by insisting they “don’t matter”
• automatic negative reactions: having habitual, self-defeating thoughts
• magnifying or minimizing the importance of an event: making a bigger deal about a specific event or moment
• drawing overly broad conclusions from a single event
• taking things too personally or feeling actions are specifically directed at you
• mental filter: picking out a single negative detail and dwelling on it exclusively so that the vision of reality becomes darkened

Over time you will learn how to replace negative thought patterns with more constructive ones. This can be done through learning to control and change distorted thoughts and reactions; learning to assess situations more accurately and respond appropriately; practicing self-talk or thinking that is accurate and balanced and not self-critical or self-defeating, and using self-evaluation to reflect and respond appropriately.

You can practice these coping methods on your own or with your psychologist. Alternately you can practice them in controlled settings in which you’re confronted with challenges. Maybe you have close friends who can help you work on this.

Finally, just remember that counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy is usually used with other forms of treatment for depression, for example St John’s wort or prescription antidepressant. Your doctor might recommend you take prescription antidepressants while learning better thinking patterns and effective strategies for coping. Once you have these down pat, you can come off your antidepressants. You might also be eating better and exercising which will help.

Depression is a serious illness and not one to be underestimated. Look to natural treatments, even tell the professionals you’d like to go down this path, but also listen to their advice. I’m sure that together you will be guided back to good mental health.