> The majority of depression cases are relatively self-induced and could be fixed with simple behaviour modifications.
I am very wary of telling a depressed person that it's probably just a matter of making the right lifestyle tweaks.
There are certainly people that are clinically depressed that are also physically active (some friends of mine are in that group). OP states as much.
But I agree with OP, if we’re not going to talk about the low hanging fruit of exercise, diet, and sleep, we’re not going to get anywhere with combating depression.
Edit: here’s just one of many studies (there are literally hundreds of them) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC474733/
Yes, there is. It all shows that exercise is moderately better than nothing as a treatment for depression, unless you only include good quality trials in which case the effectiveness drops off.
https://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depr...
> Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression.
[...]
> The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive.
Personally I choose exercise over medication, and haven’t had any significant depressive episodes since I started swimming, running, and practicing yoga four or five times per week. As a bonus my body feels great and my mind is more clear now too. I just wish I could have made younger me wake up to it (even though I knew what the answer was).
There are certainly people that aren’t able bodied and can’t choose exercise, or are clinically depressed beyond what exercise would be effective for, but for many people a solution seems to be exercise.
Sleep: https://aasm.org/studies-find-new-links-between-sleep-durati... https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/sleep-and-... https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/related-illnesses/sle...
Stimulants: This one I may be wrong about. My general thinking is if it disturbs your sleep and poor sleep habits cause depression, you should stay away from the stims.
Exercise: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC474733/ https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.20...
Screen time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551... https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/11/15/more-screen-time-ti...
Alcohol: This one I may be flat out wrong on. Moderate alcohol consumption seems to have an anti-depressant effect. Heavy alcohol consumption is associated with depression and suicide.
Most of what I said, especially about diet, exercise, and sleep are not controversial.
A lot of this research is further confounded by the simple fact that depressed people exercise less as well as eat less healthy. Epidemiology does not show causation here, only interventional studies do with tiny effects.
Example is the studies that show having friends makes one less depressed. Obviously people who are depressed regularly have fewer friends because they're avoided.
But it is controversial. This is the most frustrating thing with ultracrepidarians - you can use a search engine so you think you know better than people who devote their lives to studying this stuff.
If good diet and exercise was effective to prevent depression we'd see lower rates of mental ill health in athletes, but that's not what we see. We see similar rates.
1) you're hurt, you need to rest
2) don't drown so keep as much things you can in check (rhythm, sunlight, diet, movement) even it's just one thing do it, then be proud and rest again
3) you can't see it now but things will improve, just slowly. Again take your time, but keep in mind : slow and steady, you'll be back I promise
I’m not advocating for people who are currently taking anti-depressants to drop their pills tomorrow.
The studies (I’m on the train so I’m not trying to cite these sources, google it) show that lifestyle changes with antidepressants is much more effective than antidepressants alone.
Even if you have a non-self-inflicted chemical imbalance, your shrink is likely to prescribe all of the things I listed.
Source: my shrink, and every shrink worth their salt.
You qualified it. If you quantified it, you would have provided numbers backing up your argument.
This is simply untrue.
The false dichotomy between "self-induced" and "non-self-inflicted [sic]" is something that your "shrink" would have dismissed in the first minutes of honest conversation, before turning to your list of lifestyle adjustments and pointing out that there is a wide range of responses to them.
The kind of baseless speculation that you offer, followed by the obligatory confirmation-bias sequence, is precisely how some people end up treating psychiatric illness in highly neglectful and harmful ways.
This is a flag that shows you don't know what you're talking about. No one credible talks about chemical imbalance; it's a model that's been out of use for many years now.
I don't see rednerrus advocating that. But if what they say is true, then psychotherapists need to know that, and plan their therapies accordingly.