Post #4 studies on depression

When analyzing psychological health, depression and anxiety are some of the most common problems. It is hard to measure psychological well being characteristics like these because most of the time, they are internal to people and can only be revealed through questionnaires and self reports of how they are feeling. However, there are some ways to measure psychological health using MRI's, or conducting studies on subjects that actually have the disorder and observing whether their health improves or the symptoms are reduced. Thus, in discussing the positive effects of exercise on psychological health, there are a few ways to accurately measure it.

In one specific study the researchers compared effects of exercise and drug therapy in treating clinically depressed people. There were 156 depressed patients divided into three groups: those recieving anti-depressants, those recieving aerobic exercise, and those recieving both treatments. Although it would be better for my research if exercise was the best treatment, the study found that 68.8% of participants recieving a combination of treatment were no longer classified by doctors as clinically depressed after treatment (the measurement). This was significantly higher than the other groups and shows that maybe exercise combined with medicine is the best treatment after all. Should I include this in the paper to come? In looking at more studies of clinically depressed people, it seems that combination is the best. However, multiple studies have shown that exercise does reduce THE RISK of anxiety and depression disorders, which I think is a very important finding because maybe the disorders would not show up in the first place if people had properly exercised. Also depression is correlated with self esteem and maybe it is reduced partly because of the enhancing effects exercise has on self esteem.

Another interesting study that could be incorporated into my paper found that exercise has long lasting effects on depression. In a similar study to the one above, depressed patients had reduction in symptoms of depression after exercise. The interesting part of this is that the research followed patients whose depression had subsided for six months and found that only 8% of those who exercised and continued to exercise had depression return. This is compared to 38% for drugs only treatment and 31% of the dug and exercise combination. Thus, this finding shows that exercise alone is the most important predictor of returning depression rather than the combination of exercise and drugs. this shows it may be first important during depression to incorporate both, but as it diminishes reduce the drugs and use more exercise.