Dr. B's Blog

You've to move it move it.

My son has a birthday card he got from his grandparents. It's one of those annoying singing birthday cards that have no audio fidelity at all but makes a 4 year-old crack up. The song is I like to move it. (by a band I've never heard of called "Reel 2 Real".) Whatever the band's name is or the degree of annoyance of the song, it's a catchy tune and an apt title for this post. The NYT reports:

Each volunteer exercised for four months, while continuing to take an antidepressant. At the end of that time, according to the study published recently in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 29.5 percent had achieved remission, “which is a very robust result,” Dr. Trivedi said, equal to or better than the remission rates achieved using drugs as a back-up treatment. “I think that our results indicate that exercise is a very valid treatment option” for people whose depression hasn’t yielded to S.S.R.I.’s, he said.

I like to think of early depression treatment as targeting one or more of the areas affected by Major Depressive Disorder:

  1. Cognitive
  2. Somatic (physical/energy levels)
  3. Sleep
  4. Emotional
  5. Motivational

There are others things that need to be targeted but the majority of patients in early treatment for depression have a lot of work to do one one or more of those areas and it's extremely relevant to their situation. It's nice to see something so clearly affected by depression, yet so incredibly simple to do, gets continued attention in the press and research literature.