When a practice alleviates symptoms of distress in your life, you’re likely to believe it has therapeutic powers. Anecdotal evidence might not be data, but for individuals suffering from depression, anything uplifting should be considered beneficial—taking side effects into consideration, of course.
Treating depression with a pill might help a person sustain and even thrive in an environment they perceive as negative. If the positive benefits outweigh long-term side effects then it’s a valuable course of action.
Then there’s movement, which in general has less room for damaging side effects. Cardiovascular exercise has numerous benefits on both physical and mental health. This we know. Then there are slower movements, such as Feldenkrais, myofascial release techniques, and yoga.
The latter is particularly close to me, given that I’ve taught it for fourteen years and have practiced it for twenty. It has certainly helped me deal with a range of problems, including anxiety disorder, divorce, cancer, and general feelings of dis-ease. I don’t believe I’ve ever left a class feeling worse than when I entered. Usually I feel better, existential crisis or not.
Yet I’ve remained skeptical of many health benefits assigned to yoga over the decades given how rampant pseudoscience is in that community. A temporary balm is not always a solution. That said, the more research conducted on treating depression with yoga, the more positive the results have been, as is the case with recent studies presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.
Lindsey Hopkins, a doctor at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, conducted a study on twenty-three male veterans, a particularly vulnerable group for mental health problems. Each veteran practiced hatha yoga (nearly all asana (postural) classes are based on hatha yoga) twice a week for eight weeks. Their self-reported satisfaction score at the end of the study was 9.4 (from 1 to 10), which measured how much their depression had lessened during that time.
Bikram yoga is an offshoot of hatha yoga performed in a heated room. While…
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