How depressing. I woke up this morning, it’s pissing down, nobody’s quite forgiven the Republican poem I read out at the local Jubilee celebration, the geraniums are wilting, and some party pooper has just published a report saying that exercise is no good for depression.
So all of you who thought you were learning how to cope with your out-of-kilter brain, who had worked so hard to release endorphins and get a serotonin surge, who had made life manageable by running, going to the gym, dancing, or whatever, were WRONG.
According to this report, carried out by the universities of Bristol and Exeter, and funded by the Department of Health, you exercise-tastic depression-battlers are simply deluding yourself. The study is, apparently, the first large-scale, randomised controlled trial to establish whether exercise should be used in primary health care to help treat adults with depression. Researchers looked at 361 patients aged 18-69 who had recently been diagnosed with depression. Patients were then split into two groups – one received the physical activity intervention in addition to usual care, and the other were just given usual care.
They were followed up for 12 months to assess any changes in their symptoms. Researchers found that those who had been put in the exercise group were “slightly less depressed than those on ‘usual care’ alone, but this difference was not large enough to be statistically valid. Melanie Chalder, from the University of Bristol’s school of social and community medicine, said: “Numerous studies have reported the positive effects of physical activity for people suffering with depression but our intervention was not an effective strategy for reducing symptoms.”
As a depressed manic exerciser, who has found running hugely helpful, I would like to blow a great big Panglossian fart in the face of this churlish research. First of all, slightly less depressed, even if not statistically valid, has to be better than the same or more depressed.
Second, it is unclear, to me at least, what stage of depression the participants were at. Yes, if somebody was so depressed that they can’t face getting out of bed, ordering them to go for a 10km run probably wouldn’t do the trick. Indeed, it might make them feel considerably worse.
However, we depressives don’t “use” exercise like this – it’s not a panacea, it’s a means of managing depression once we’re beginning to feel better or when it is in remission; a way of keeping it at bay.
Numerous studies support this – as indeed does the NHS, which has advised exercise alongside traditional care (usually antidepressants or counselling) for aeons. I’m no expert, but you don’t need to be to work out why exercise can work wonders. We feel less self-loathing and existential nausea because we are doing stuff, probably making ourselves look a little better in the process; we feel mildly triumphal because we’re not allowing the demons to dominate; we’re getting out into the fresh air, seeing and feeling the sun (which is just what depressives at their nadir tend to deny themselves), we’re more social (nodding and smiling at fellow runners), develop a sense of camaraderie and solidarity, generally feel more optimistic and included in the world, and most importantly we get a buzz. For those of us who take Prozac or an equivalent we understand what a serotonin kick feels like when it hits us, and are in a pretty good position to feel what it’s like when we get a double rush (through pills and running) and when we are denied that.
As well as the serotonin boost, many depressives experience a petrifying muzziness in the head – we can’t think straight for all the clutter and contradictions. It can feel as if you’re living inside an amp with chronic feedback. For me, it’s like a metronome constantly clicking from side to side in my head. People might ask the simplest questions – what time is it, what are you doing this evening – and I can’t answer for the clicking. I know if I exercise, and in particular run, the metronome turns itself down or disappears.
Perhaps the most patronising thing about this research is the suggestion that while it might be useless for depression, exercise might well help the obese and diabetic and those with dodgy tickers, and that those conditions might contribute to depression.
I’ve spoken to a fair few depressive sportsmen and women and they have told me how much running has done for them. Yes, they were fit beforehand, but they weren’t getting the buzz they needed. Ronnie O’Sullivan took up running to fight his depression, and he is now a highly competitive club runner. “I lie there some mornings and think what’s the point of even getting out of bed? I end up lying there until one in the afternoon. I’ll struggle up, have a cup of tea and that’s pretty much it. Those are the days you just lose,” he told the Guardian’s Donald McRae in 2009. “Running clears my mind, and gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”
Former footballer, commentator and depressive Stan Collymore tells me he runs six miles a day. At his lowest, he says, he just takes to bed. “I sleep 18 hours a day, so I don’t see sunlight over sometime a period of a week, which I’m sure a doctor then would tell me makes the body shut down even further,” he recently wrote. “Running means you’re actively fighting it. It takes a massive leap of faith to know that this time next week, life could be running again, smiling, my world big and my brain back as it should be.”
Many studies into the relationship between exercise and depression don’t look at the former in terms of defeating the latter, they do so as a means of exercise preventing the worst of the depression returning. In 2000, scientists at Duke University Medical Centre, North Carolina, tested exercise against the antidepressant Zoloft, and concluded that exercise seemed to do a better job of keeping symptoms from coming back after the depression lifted.
Meanwhile, only five years ago at the very same Bristol university that has just found exercise to not help depression, a 10-year study of British middle-aged men found that those who exercised regularly and vigorously were less likely to develop depression.
Perhaps we should rely on self-knowledge rather than research when it comes to depression. After all, nobody knows your own body and mind quite like you do. So sod the academics, I’m off for a run.
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