Posted by linkadge on October 23, 2007, at 12:20:43
In reply to Re: That Way Lies Madness, posted by Jamal Spelling on October 23, 2007, at 10:58:46
The notion that an individual with a mental illness needs to be on medication or else they will remain sick is not really all that accurate.
In addition to that, there are many people who will remain sick in spite of the best conventional treatments.
For many people, current medications don't help, so it comes down to taking a medication that does nothing and produces a whole load of side effects, or simply taking nothing at all.
It baffles me that you seem to have a hard time beliving two things:
a) People cannot improve without the help of modern psychiatric medicinces.
b) People who improve without medications really have no illness at all.Clinical depression is a remitting disease. It usually remits within about 8 months to 1 year. That basically means that despite whatever gene a person has, or whatever biochemical abnormality an individual has, the brain is able to adjust and correct its problem over time. You don't give the brain enough credit.
I think the real reason that people like to discount the power of healthful lifestyles, stress reduction, exercise, and social support, is because it removes the guilt out of their decision to take medications, and sit on their
behind all day.Even an individual with a genetic disposition to high cholesterol or high blood pressure can make dramatic changes to either of those paramters through lifestyle changes.
>They have all kinds of theories,
>non of them coming from a medical education, like
>"exercise-induced endomorphins"-- well, how manyActually, there is considerable scientific literature on the antidepressant capacity of exercise.The fact that you don't believe in the medical basis to the antidepressant effects of exercise is a testament to your lack of interest in reading quality research on the topic. Exercise has the capacity to prompt many of the exact same changes as chemical antidepressant treatment. In a number of studies, exercise outperforms antidepressant treatments. In many studies exercise regiments reduce the risk of releapse into depression more thouroghly than chemical antidepressant treatments.
If a chemical antidepressant does it, so does exercise. Here are some of the many researched topics pertaining to the modes of mood modification chronic exercise treatment.
Increase in endorphen production
Increase in monoamines (serotonin, norepininephrine, dopamine, traces amines like PEA)
Regulation of genes coding for HPA axis function.
Modulation of stress induced cortisol function.
Improvements in sleep archetecutre
Improvements in glucose utilization
Endocannabanoid (anandamide) increase
Enhancement of hippocampal neurogenesis (far in excess of that produced by antidepressant treatment)
Enhanced responsivness of monoamine receptors.
Dramatic enhancement of endogenious nerve growth factors (BDNF, GDNF, BCL-2, FGF-2, NGF, CDNF)
Enhanced responsivness in forced swim tests
Enhanced neuropeptide function (ie neuropeptide Y)
Increased Limbic gabaergic function
Improvements in thyroid function
Prevention of age related reduction in temporal lobe density
Increase in mitochondrial and cellular resilliance protiens ie HSP (heat shock protein)
Documented antidepressant effects in clinical trials.There are many other studies too that support the ability of exercise to maintain mental health. For instance, if you inject a parkinson's disease inducing toxin into a sedentary animal it will induce parkinsons, but if you do the same to an animal that chronically exercises, the same toxin will do considerably less dammage, probably owing to exercise induced neuroprotective mechanisms.
The list goes on and on. The fact is that if exercise could be bottled and sold as a pill, it would be the single most profitable drug ever designed. I think it is abundantly clear that exercise can exert a powerful antidepressant effect for many people, and the scientific research is there to back it up. Perhaps it will not *work* for everbody, but I would be willing to bet that there would be no case of depression that would not benifit in some way. Nobody would ever expect a chemical antidepressant to work for everbody either. Ie I woudn't go around saying that because Wellbutrin didn't work for me that it is not a real antidepressant, and that anybody who benifits from Wellbutrin didn't really have a problem to begin with just because it clearly doesn't target "true" biochemical depression.Is Huntington's disease not a real disease?? Huntingon's is as biochemical as it comes, but there is plenty of research showing that exercise dramatically reduces the onset time and sevarity of motor symptoms, and generally is an effective way to retard disease onset. So there you go.
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:790781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20071019/msgs/790831.html