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Psychiatrists should prescribe exercise before pills
January 28, 2010
OK, time for a little fun. Today on this page, I have a fantabulous video of myself jumping on my rebounder while I discuss my own mental health and more specifically my personal experience with psychiatrists.
Also, every green word you see on this page can be moused-over (move your pointer over the word with your mouse). This will result in a psychiatrist joke popping up over the word. Is there anything more fun than psychiatrist jokes? I think not.
Try it now: Mouse OVER HERE to put a smile on your face.
On with the show. I have seen psychiatrists in the past for help with depression and that annoying little schizo-thingie. I took psychiatric medications for some time.
Now that I look back on this, it amazes me that the psychiatrists would invariably take out their prescription pads and write a prescription without even asking me whether I had given daily aerobic exercise a try, to see whether my depression would lift.
Psychiatrists routinely prescribe psychiatric drugs while neglecting to ask the patient this very basic question: "You're feeling depressed? Are you exercising at all? No exercise whatsoever? I want you to engage in 30 minutes of aerobic exercise every morning for 30 days. If you still feel depressed in 30 days, come back and see me."
We forget that exercising affects the brain as much as it affects the rest of the body.
Ok, that's enough serious talk. Time for a joke. Mouse OVER HERE to put a smile on your face.
When I was living in a homeless shelter back in 2001 and seeing a psychiatrist, the good man who was trying to help me would see me for no more than 15 minutes at a time. Just long enough to ask me some questions about symptoms while he would write the prescriptions. Never a mention of exercise and the brain. |
Warning: it is strongly recommended that you, too, be jumping up and down on a mini-trampoline while watching this 3-minute video, otherwise it may make you dizzy. |
Recently there has been mention in the press of a Miami psychiatrist
who has written 284,908 prescriptions over the past 6 years.
That's an average of 150 prescriptions written per day, 7 days per week,
at a cost to Florida taxpayers of $43 millions. (1)
The fact is, the brain is a physical organ. It
responds to exercise, it responds to increased blood flow and to the bio-chemical
changes which take place in the brain when we exercise.
Exercise may not be a cure-all, but why not consider it before considering damaging drugs? For millions of years, men and women moved around all day long, because they HAD to. All of a sudden, in these past 100 years, we all become sedentary. Nobody moves anymore. We're either sitting in cars, sitting in offices, sitting at home, sitting at school. There's nothing NATURAL about this!
Exercising is free, there are no side effects and it's something that
someone suffering from depression
can do independently, on their own. No prescription needed.
Of course, the only drawback to this idea of "depressed people deciding to help themselves by changing their brain chemistry through exercise", is that it does not fatten the profits of the powerful pharmaceutical companies who do everything they can to convince psychiatrists that their new miracle psychiatric drug is the answer to their patients' problems.
Oh, I almost forgot. Mouse OVER HERE to put a smile on your face.
Marc
References
(1) http://www.cchrint.org/2010/01/18/senator-says-miami-psychiatrist-who-wrote-284908-drug-prescriptions-should-be-a-poster-boy-for-tougher-laws/
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