Mood lifting

Growing evidence suggests that exercise is as good for your mental health as it is for your physical well-being

Monday mornings, Theo Baars's exhausting depression often tries to seduce him into just staying in bed. But then, he says, a staffer at Appleton House, a residence for people with psychotic disorders at McLean Hospital, comes into his room and says, insistently, "You want to go work out."

So Baars, a 22-year-old surfer and musician, drags himself to McLean's new gym and sweats through a half hour of presses and curls. And then, he finds, he doesn't want to go back to bed. And more: His confidence is pumped up. His thinking tends to be less delusional, more reality-based.

"Working out helps me get my self back," he said.

Baars's personal experience reflects longstanding wisdom that is now gaining the added heft that comes from carefully conducted research. Exercise, the studies increasingly suggest, may be as good for your brain as it is for your body, whether you are mentally ill or not.

As Cambridge psychiatrist and author Dr. John Ratey puts it, if exercise could be bottled, it would be the greatest blockbuster drug ever. "Exercise is medicine for the brain," he said.

Initial studies show that schoolchildren on a vigorous exercise program score better on standardized tests and are less prone to violence, Ratey writes in "Spark," a new book on exercise and the brain. He tells people that going for a run is like taking a bit of Prozac - to lighten mood - and a bit of Ritalin - to heighten attention.

Much of the recent research has focused on experimental exercise programs for people with psychiatric disorders, mainly depression, and the carefully controlled clinical trials have turned up dramatic findings.

"There is growing evidence that exercise may be an effective treatment for patients with clinical depression, and that its effectiveness may be comparable to other established treatments such as antidepressant medications," said Dr. James A. Blumenthal, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University who has led some of the seminal studies.

Last year, his team reported that among 202 depressed people randomly assigned to various treatments, three sessions of vigorous aerobic exercise a week proved about as effective at beating back depression as daily doses of Zoloft, when the effects were measured after four months.

In another study, he found that depressed patients who got better with exercise were less likely to relapse after 10 months than those helped by antidepressants. And patients who continued to exercise after the four-month mark were 50 percent less likely to be depressed months later than those who were sedentary, Blumenthal said.

Other studies suggest that exercise may be about as effective as psychotherapy, the other main tool for alleviating depression, said Michael Otto, a Boston University professor of psychology. He led a 2006 review of research on exercise and mental health, published in Clinical Psychology.