Running can help your mental health
Over the past week, Dr John Onate has been running in the mountains of Europe, oohing and ahhing at what he calls ‘‘the Comic-con’’ of trail running.
He’s been at the UTMB festival, the week-long trail running party that surrounds the famous 100 mile Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc race in the French town of Chamonix.
Rock stars of the sport turn up, even if they’re not racing. New Zealand’s own trail running queen, Ruth Croft, went and won the OCC, a 55 kilometre mountain race that is part of the festival (two other Kiwis – Caitlin Fielder and Nancy Jiang – were in the top 10, too).
So on the Dirt Church Radio podcast this week with my cohost, Matt Rayment, it was interesting to talk to Onate about Chamonix’s charm.
But as fascinating as it was – with a large dose of FOMO – the real reason we got him on the show was to talk about something far more important: depression and suicide.
Onate is a professor at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, trained in psychiatry and internal medicine.
Throw in his running experience and you could say he’s triply qualified to talk about mental illness and running. And it’s a hot, hot topic. There are plenty of people, myself included, who’ll tell you running is good for their mental health.
It’s helped me deal with grief, cope with stress, just sort stuff out in my head – and be more of a social animal.
I sometimes wonder how I’d cope without it because it’s been an integral part of my life for about 30 years.
When I don’t run, I get antsy – and a kind of running-deficient grumpiness.
I have a T-shirt that says, ‘‘Not running sucks’’. I smile when people laugh and shake their heads.
Yep, running is in my head. Onate knows that feeling. And he also knows that aerobic exercise has benefits for the body in general.
‘‘This is a hot topic, not just in psychiatry, but in medicine generally,’’ he told us.
‘‘Aerobic exercise is this amazing intervention that can not only help with your mental health, but has profound effects on your physical wellbeing and reverses so many of the chronic illnesses of modern life, such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.’’
He sees it in his clinical practice where he oversees patients’ primary needs, acute medical needs, post-hospital treatment and their psychiatric care.
‘‘I try to encourage all my patients to become more physically active because, to me, it’s a very key component.
‘‘It’s like this one magic intervention that can not only help the person’s depression but, unlike other treatments in psychiatry which only focus on the brain and behaviour and emotional state, exercise will also improve their cardiovascular risk, for example.’’
There’s a point at which running is not the only answer and there is not yet solid evidence around the real effectiveness of running as a treatment.
As a medical researcher, he’d love to see a robust effectiveness trial to understand questions he still ponders.
‘‘What’s the effect size of it, how effective is it compared to ECT or psychotherapy or drugs, and what kinds of disorders does it help with?’’
Even without bullet-proof evidence to answer those questions, Onate says there’s a point at which running is not enough, when it’s time to seek other help.
‘‘When things aren’t getting better, or even getting worse, even though you’re exercising more, if you’re still having pretty severe depression and isolating a lot, that’s the time when you don’t necessarily have to stop the exercise, but you may need some additional treatments.’’
That may be medication, it may be psychotherapy – ‘‘the good news is we’re living in a time when there are a lot of treatment options for depression,’’ Onate says.
The important thing is, get help. Don’t run away.