I've been clinically diagnosed with depression and other fun stuff for nearly two decades now. Exercise is great as a stimulant to your emotional fortitude but it hasn't "fixed" shit for me like they said it would. "Here's a bottle of 60mg pills, give it a month to feel better". If I had a plank of wood every time I heard that after trying their holistic idea, I'd have built my own house to get away from this fucking dismal housing market.

However, I think our problems paint the picture for us: Mental health issues are treated more like chronic staph infections than the psychological trauma they are. Everyone's damage is so acutely unique to them, because it happened to them, so treatments need to be equally as personal. I don't have the source on me, so take my statement how you wish, but nearly half of all diagnosed Depressives are given drug-only treatments.

The solution is to expand therapeutic services to help more people (i.e. government programs to subsidize the cost of services to the psych practice) and only use medications as a short-term supplement during treatment. This would help those afflicted to reach the point they can do the more holistic approaches and wean off the drugs.

Then again, that doesn't get the pharmaceutical corporations paid... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On a more personal note, we also need better therapists. The ones I have must've had some shit they're dealing with of their own because my sessions were typically abysmal and fruitless. Maybe if I had someone who cared a titch more my brain wouldn't hate me so much. It's probably just another pay-to-win scheme; I'm poor so I'm doomed to shitty service. Idk. I just work here, man.

I'm so sorry. I am chroniclly depressed myself. Lexapro helps a bit but I struggle to get myself to keep taking it. Long endurance exercise like running helps my mood but in my depressed state I cannot get myself to actually do it.

I wish they could just fix our fucking brains so we could be "normal"

Effexor

Absolutely everyone I have talked to/seen who has taken effexor has horror stories about it. That drug should not be prescribed.

For me it caused multiple manic episodes. One where I had a seizure. One where I didn't sleep for a week and was hearing voices by the end(and some worse stuff I don't want to mention). Also weird sensory effects. It's been 4 years since I have taken it and I still don't feel like I have recovered from the trauma of that drug.

Exercise has been helping a lot lately tho. I cant say I do it every day but I do a moderately intense exercise session about 1-3 times a week. Intense enough my legs hurt the next day. Tho I do forget to do it some weeks.

I was in the "struggles to get out of bed" category of depression. For me what helped was just doing the absolute minimum amount of exercise I could muster, like jog in place for a min while I waited for my hot pocket to nuke. Just did that every once in a while when I remembered. Having a baseline of occasionally doing it let me build on that over many months to more intense exercises. I'm not going to say my depression is cured but it has very objectively improved. Getting out of bed is not nearly as hard now, and my ability to take care of myself and my environment has improved as well. Looking for work again too.

I'm curious, did that make you feel better or worse? I used to punish myself by slicing up my forearm and it did make me feel happy even though it was a terrible way to go about doing that.

I think this study suffers from confirmation bias. The people who actually got themselves to do excercise were already intrinsically motivated enough to actually do it. That way you self-select for a positive result.

I didn't read the actual study btw, it's possible they already adjusted the results due to this.

I’m aware that depression causes major lack of motivation, nothing in my comment insinuated the opposite. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be the first avenue for treatment, ahead of medication.