Beat the blues with exercise

Dr Lefever notes that while antidepressants may limit your capacity to feel depressed, they also limit your ability to feel happy, which puts you in a mental straitjacket of sorts. Though he acknowledges that severely and clinically depressed people will almost always need some form of drug therapy, he prefers to use a natural mood-altering process like exercise wherever possible.

‘Exercise is part of the recovery programme at Promis because there are worse things in life than being addicted to physical activity, but you can’t really say that about antidepressants,’ he says.

Cathy, a 34-year-old TV producer, found that exercise helped pull her out of depression. At a time when she was going through a rough time emotionally and professionally, Cathy told her doctor she felt suicidal. He prescribed Prozac. ‘My boyfriend had dumped me, I’d been made redundant and I was moving house. To top it all off, my mother was ill. It felt like my whole world was coming to and end.’

‘It was a few weeks before I felt any better. The Prozac didn’t make me feel euphoric, but it did take the edge off things,’ she says. After a month, Cathy upped her dose from her prescribed one tablet to four (the maximum prescribed dose) a day because she didn’t feel that she was progressing.

‘I eventually got fed up with taking the drug and felt I was destroying myself,’ says Cathy. ‘I decided to get fit instead so I joined a health club. I didn’t want to be a victim anymore and didn’t want to be controlled by a drug.’

After Cathy started going to the gym regularly, three times a week, she was able to stop taking Prozac. ‘Within a few sessions of running for half an hour on the treadmill and doing free weights I felt better and had made new friends in the gym.’

Cathy claims she wouldn’t take antidepressants again as it was just masking her problems, whereas exercise was a way to be active and face her issues head on. ‘Exercise is about getting out there and taking control of your life,’ she says, ‘and that’s more than any drug can do.’

For information about Promis Recovery Centre, log on to www.Promis.co.uk or ring the Promis helpline on 0800 374 318.