Physical exercise naturally treats psychiatric patients: Study

A new study has recommended physical exercise as a natural way to treat patients with mental health and mood disorders - 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 at the University of Vermont Medical Center and the lead researcher of the study.

Practitioners at inpatient psychiatric facilities - often crowded, acute settings in which patients experience severe distress and discomfort - typically prescribe psychotropic medications first, rather than natural remedies like physical exercise, to alleviate patients' symptoms such as anger, anxiety and depression.

In fact, Tomasi estimated that only a handful of inpatient psychiatric hospitals in the United States provide psychotherapist-supported gym facilities exclusively for these patients. Instead, practitioners rely on classical psychotherapeutic and pharmacological frameworks to treat psychiatric symptoms, which they monitor to determine when a patient is ready to be discharged from the facility.

Tomasi built a gym exclusively for roughly 100 patients in the medical centre's inpatient psychiatry unit and led and introduced 60-minute structured exercise and nutrition education programmes into their treatment plans. The psychotherapists surveyed patients on their mood, self-esteem and self-image both before and after the exercise sessions to gauge the effects of exercise on psychiatric symptoms.

Patients reported lower levels of anger, anxiety and depression, higher self-esteem, and overall improved moods.

Tomasi found an average of 95 per cent of patients reported that their moods improved after doing the structured exercises, while 63 per cent of the patients reported being happy or very happy, as opposed to neutral, sad or very sad, after the exercises. An average of 91.8 per cent of patients also reported that they were pleased with the way their bodies felt after doing the structured exercises.

"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.