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Vitamins and Exercise Enhance Treatment for Depression and Bipolar disorder

More than twenty million adult Americans suffer clinical depression, and another five million endure the roller coaster ride from depression to hypo-mania and back again, experiencing the complications of what we now call bi-polar disorder.  For almost all depressed and bi-polar patients, regular medication and psychotherapy provide tremendous relief.  Now, psychiatrists and researchers are finding that addition of multi-vitamins and regular exercise dramatically improve patients’ conditions.

A lifelong struggle

Explaining their conditions to patients, physicians and psychologists frequently draw the analogy between affective disorders and diabetes.  Both result from bio-chemical imbalances in their systems: Affective disorders originate in imbalances among neuro-transmitters just as diabetes originates in insulin imbalances.  Left undiagnosed and untreated, affecti9ve disorders may degenerate into psychosis or schizophrenia just as untreated diabetes may lead to loss of limbs and ultimately may be fatal.  Alt6hough scientists have not found a cure for affective disorders, the current generation of serotonin reuptake inhibitors has proven effective in over 90% of depressed and bi-polar patients.  With bi-polar patients, physicians may prescribe supplemental mood regulators, Risperidal most commonly the drug-of-choice.  Just as insulin gives diabetics the capacity to manage their symptoms and maintain their normal work and activities, so anti-depressants and mood regulators empower depressed and bi-polar patients to restore their mechanisms of self-control and restore their lives to normal.

Still, every person suffering an affective disorder experiences “episodes” when their symptoms elude the reach of medication.  Conducting carefully controlled studies with patients in residential treatment centers, psychometrists have documented the effects of multiple vitamins and regular exercise on patients’ moods and symptoms.  Depressed patients report more than 80% reduction in severe depressive episodes when they take twice-daily does of adult vitamins in combination with regular workouts.  Bipolar patients report similar reductions in “rapid cycling,” that is, precipitous falls from elation to depression or sudden spikes from melancholy to manic compulsion. 

Get Moving!

Patients must understand affective disorders respond well to medication and regular cognitive therapy, but drugs and counseling simply relieve symptoms and restore their control over their behaviors.  Patients must participate in and contribute to their own recoveries.  The therapists’ most powerful advice: “Get Moving!”  They especially recommend regular, repetitive, rhythmic exercise.  Swimming tops their lists of preferred exercises, because it demands rhythmic breathing and it triggers release of endorphins and dopamine after approximately twenty minutes of sustained exertion.  Especially if swimmers can count their strokes and breathe every fourth freestyle stroke, they maximize the affective benefits of their swims; the longer they can keep going, the more they benefit both physically and psychologically.

Doctors also recommend their depressed and bipolar patients get going to their pharmacies, investing in regular adult strength multiple vitamins.  Especially if patients eliminate caffeinated beverages and processed sugars from their diets, loading-up on vegetable and meat proteins, vitamins appear to have therapeutic benefits almost equal to medications’.  Doctors strongly caution against patients’ going off their medications for strictly naturopathic remedies; but they wholeheartedly advocate complementing pharmaceutical therapies with naturopathic practices.  Emerging science also suggests that mega-doses of B-vitamins contribute substantially to patients’ capacity for managing their deepest depressions.