Category: depression
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More evidence that exercise helps with mood
A study was published in Lancet Psychiatry yesterday that added to the evidence that exercise is good for one’s mental health. In this study, participants rated their mood nearly 1.5 days per month less if they exercised compared to similar people who didn’t exercise. Those who engaged in team sports, cycling and other exercise with…
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Switching Psych Meds Often Doesn’t Help
A recently published meta-analysis of over 3000 studies suggested that switching antidepressants after the first drug doesn’t produce the desired results is not better than staying the course and/or exploring options other than trying a different drug. This is a very interesting finding as most prescribing clinicians tend to give one antidepressant a “trial” of…
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No time to exercise?
A really interesting study just came out on PLOS One that should be of particular interest to those of us who say they just don’t have enough time to exercise. The study took a bunch of sedentary guys and divided them into three groups: regular exercise, interval training and lazy controls. The guys in the…
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Is Psychotherapy Better Than Medication?
The American College of Physicians has released a new clinical guideline on the treatment of depression in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They suggested that psychotherapy is as effective for treating depression as antidepressants, and “given its relative lack of potential harms, should be strongly considered as the first-line treatment.” This is consistent with the…
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Primary Care Providers to Screen all Patients for Depression
The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) now officially recommends that primary care health clinicians screen all of their patients for depression. Though this is wonderful, this is very, very long overdue. The costs associated with depression and other mental health screen are insignificant relative to the potential gains of “catching” otherwise unrecognized suffering patients.…
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Does more sex mean more happiness?
A really interesting paper just came out today that looked at, and challenged, the widely held belief that the more frequently you have sex the happier you are… and they discovered that this was simply not true. What the researchers did find was that most healthy couples had sex about once per week and that…
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Can Talk Therapy Change Your Brain?
I teach a great professional development and clinical consultation class at Loyola University Maryland. Yesterday morning my doctoral students and I had a great discussion about what makes psychotherapy work (among some other very stimulating discussions). This morning I received an email with a link to an article entitled, Revival of psychotherapy? How “talk” therapy…
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Therapy, Medication or Both (or Neither)?
I stumbled upon this brief piece in the Huffington Post about when patients should consider doing psychotherapy, trying medication, doing both at the same time or not doing anything at all. I liked this article because it was short and to the point while giving some nice examples behind the answer to the question: “it…
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Psychotherapy Helps Prevent Suicide
An article was recently published in The Lancet Psychiatry and nicely summarized in Forbes describing the benefits of even short-term psychotherapy on repeated suicide attempts and suicide related deaths. Not surprisingly, the data suggest that talk therapy serves to significantly reduce the frequency of suicide following a previous suicide attempt. The Forbes article also very…