Exercise and Depression

Article by the Mayo Clinic: "Depression and anxiety: Exercise eases symptoms"

Here is an excerpt from the article: "Exercise can improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. Even a little exercise helps. Use these realistic tips and goals to get started and stick with it.

"When you have depression or anxiety, exercising may be the last thing you think you can do. But you can overcome the inertia. See how exercise can ease depression symptoms and anxiety symptoms. Plus, get realistic tips to get started and stick with exercising.

"Exercise has long been touted as a way to maintain physical fitness and help prevent high blood pressure, diabetes and other diseases. A growing volume of research shows that exercise can also help improve symptoms of certain mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety. Exercise may also help prevent a relapse after treatment for depression or anxiety.

"Research suggests that it may take at least 30 minutes of exercise a day for at least three to five days a week to significantly improve depression symptoms. But smaller amounts of activity — as little as 10 to 15 minutes at a time — can improve mood in the short term. 'Small bouts of exercise may be a great way to get started if it's initially too hard to do more,' Dr. Vickers-Douglas says." Link to full article.

The Myth of Mental Illness

Here is an excerpt from a groundbreaking paper entitled The Myth of Mental Illness by renown psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Szasz (Dr. Szasz' website):

"My aim in this essay is to raise the question "Is there such a thing as mental illness?" and to argue that there is not. Since the notion of mental illness is extremely widely used nowadays, inquiry into the ways in which this term is employed would seem to be especially indicated. Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" -- or physical object -- and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later -- at least to those who come to believe in them -- as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness -- whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause--let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill?

"In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth." Link to the full paper by Dr. Szasz.