Is there evidence that even light exercise can improve mental health and help treat severe mental illness? How easy is it to prove the effects? Are our ever more sedentary lifestyles putting us at risk? How easy is it to apply in the current mental health treatment system?

In this episode we have the revealing research on the use of exercise and movement to treat mental health to get up to date on. This is the third episode out of three in this series on the theme of life-style medicine, the other two being on Sleep for mental health (Episode #72 with Roxanne Prichard) and on diet for mental health (Episode #70 with Felice Jacka), so please check those out as all 3 interrelate in term of mental health outcomes. In this episode though we get into the reasons why even a little movement has a radical effect on our mental health; that movement can be used in association with talky and drug therapies to effectively treat even serious mental health disturbances like schizophrenia; we also get into the huge host of improvements across the board when exercise is applied; the impressive bulk of clinical trials that have proved this in the last 15 years; and we hear about the faster than usual uptake of this data by international policy makers, and the difficulties of practically integrating these protocols into the mental health care system.

Now fortunately for us, our guest today is one of the world’s leading researchers in this field, mental health physiotherapist and Kings College London researcher, Brendon Stubbs. He is the co-author of over 800 highly cited scientific papers, and the book “Exercise-Based Interventions for Mental Illness: Physical Activity as Part of Clinical Treatment”.