Psychiatric patients benefit from physical exercise, study states
| Jun 4, 2019, 22:00 IST
Psychiatric patients are often treated with medication and therapy that requires them to use their minds. However, a new study has found that even physical exercise can help psychiatric patients. In fact, the study claims that physical exercise can be used to naturally cure a number of mental health issues and disorders ranging 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,” explained David Tomasi, a psychotherapist and inpatient psychiatry group therapist.
A gym was built for about 100 patients each of whom was asked to go through 60 minutes of physical exercise each day. The mental health (mood, self-image, confidence levels) of these patients was measured before and after the exercise sessions. It was found that patients reported feeling much better in terms of mental health after they had exercised. So, they had less anxiety, lower levels of anger and depression and they felt a lot more confident.
It was also found that 95% of patients said their mood improved significantly after exercising whereas 63% reported feeling happy. 91.8% of the patients also said that they were happy about the way their bodies felt after the exercise.
“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,” explained Tomasi.
“The priority is to provide more natural strategies for the treatment of mood disorders, depression and anxiety,” he added.
“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,” explained David Tomasi, a psychotherapist and inpatient psychiatry group therapist.
A gym was built for about 100 patients each of whom was asked to go through 60 minutes of physical exercise each day. The mental health (mood, self-image, confidence levels) of these patients was measured before and after the exercise sessions. It was found that patients reported feeling much better in terms of mental health after they had exercised. So, they had less anxiety, lower levels of anger and depression and they felt a lot more confident.
It was also found that 95% of patients said their mood improved significantly after exercising whereas 63% reported feeling happy. 91.8% of the patients also said that they were happy about the way their bodies felt after the exercise.
“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,” explained Tomasi.
“The priority is to provide more natural strategies for the treatment of mood disorders, depression and anxiety,” he added.
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