New research suggests that a walk round the block may be more beneficial to your mental health than popping a pill

A study just published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concludes that exercise may be more effective than drugs in treating mild to moderate depression. The report by researchers at Freie University in Berlin found that just thirty minutes of exercise a day significantly improved the moods of patients who had been suffering from depression for nine months.

The 12 patients were asked to walk on a treadmill and to assess their moods before and after the ten-day exercise programme. Results showed that over half the patients who took part felt less depressed.

‘Physical activity has the same effect as antidepressants,’ explains Dr Fernando Dimeo who led the research. ‘Aerobic exercise stimulates neurotransmitters in our brain to produce serotonin, an endorphin which make us feel good. And exercise, unlike antidepressants, has no negative side effects.’

One of the main advantages of using exercise to boost your mood is that the effect is instant. Antidepressants usually take between two and three weeks to kick in, which can be a long time if you’re feeling really blue. And exercise, unlike antidepressants, is also not chemically addictive.

Another study done by Exeter University's sports science department is monitoring a football team that consists of manic depressives and schizophrenics to see if exercise will positively impact their mental health. So far their initial findings show a significant improvement in players' moods.

Dr Robert Lefever, GP and director of Promis Recovery Centre in Kent, sees an increasing number of people coming into treatment addicted to antidepressants. He claims that a third of the adult population in the UK is taking a prescribed mood-altering drug such as an antidepressant or tranquilliser when they may not need to be.

‘It is better to avoid using a drug if possible can because it can interfere with brain biochemistry, and our knowledge of how drugs affect the brain is in its infancy,’ says Dr Lefever. ‘It’s really like prescribing heroin for toothache. It gets rid of the symptom but doesn’t address the root of the problem,’ he says.

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.