Frontiers publishes systematic review on the effects of yoga on major psychiatric disorders

Yoga has positive effects on mild depression and sleep complaints, even in the absence of drug treatments, and improves symptoms associated with schizophrenia and ADHD in patients on medication, according to a systematic review of the exercise on major clinical psychiatric disorders.

Published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychiatry, on January 25th, 2013, the review of more than one hundred studies focusing on 16 high-quality controlled studies looked at the effects of yoga on depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, sleep complaints, eating disorders and cognition problems.

Yoga in popular culture

Yoga is a popular exercise and is practiced by 15.8 million adults in the United States alone, according to a survey by the Harris Interactive Service Bureau, and its holistic goal of promoting psychical and mental health is widely held in popular belief.

"However, yoga has become such a cultural phenomenon that it has become difficult for physicians and patients to differentiate legitimate claims from hype," wrote the authors in their study. "Our goal was to examine whether the evidence matched the promise."

Benefits of the exercise were found for all mental health illnesses included in the review, except for eating disorders and cognition problems as the evidence for these was conflicting or lacking.

Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Medical Center, US, and author of the study, explained that the emerging scientific evidence in support of the 5,000 year old Indian practice on psychiatric disorders is "highly promising" and showed that yoga may not only help to improve symptoms, but also may have an ancillary role in the prevention of stress-related mental illnesses.

According to Stephen Cope, a psychotherapist and author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, hatha yoga's postures improve mood by moving energy through places in the body where feelings of grief or anger are stored. "Hatha yoga is an accessible form of learning self-soothing," he says. "These blocked feelings can be released very quickly, [creating a] regular, systemic experience of well-being." Yoga students may also benefit from their relationship with the yoga instructor, Cope said, which can provide a "container" or a safe place for investigating, expressing and resolving emotional issues. The instructor's encouraging and accepting words may also help students defeat self-limiting notions.

Not all mental health practitioners are convinced of yoga's healing powers, but many agree it can be helpful when combined with more traditional treatments. Zindel Segal, Ph.D., a University of Toronto psychiatry professor, recently studied SRRP when used in conjunction with cognitive therapy. He asked 145 people who were at risk for depression to undergo cognitive therapy either alone or with the SRRP. Segal found that after eight weeks of treatment, those participants who received both types of therapy were much less likely to relapse into depression. "This means that people can learn about their emotions not just by writing down their thoughts, which is what cognitive therapy is all about, but also by paying attention to the way their emotions are expressed in their bodies," he says. "Both approaches allow people to observe their experience without judgment, an important first step in stepping out of depression."