Positive Thinking Helps Reduce Depression

A set of techniques called positive activity interactions (PAI) can help people suffering from mild and moderate depression experience reduce symptoms of their condition, to an extent that is on par to the effects produced by cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants.

The latter two are the standard courses of treatments for depression patients. They both have significant drawbacks however. CBT is time-consuming and very expensive for sufferers, whereas antidepressants can produce a host of serious and severe side-effects.

A review experts at the University of California and Duke University carried out on past studies and researches on depression revealed that encouraging people to practice positive thinking can indeed be a low-cost, high-efficiency remedy against this condition.

The science group says that not many researches were conducted in the effects of PAI on patients with severe depression. If this type of therapy proves effective for them as well, then experts may have just developed a new course of treatment for sufferers.

This is very important when taking into account the fact that more than 70 percent of all depression patients worldwide are estimated to go without any type of treatment for their condition. This happens for a variety of reasons, but lack of money and access to doctors are chief among them.

Aspects of PAI such as performing random acts of kindness, practicing optimism and so on are “the types of things that people who are happy have been practicing anyway,” University of California in Riverside (UCR) PhD student and research team member Kristin Layous explains.

“We started taking some of those thoughts and behaviors and packaging them into these interventions,” she explains. The full study is published in the August issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

The team is keen to point out that this study is not meant to discourage patients from seeking professional help through established means. What they are pointing out is what the scientific community has always known, which is that drugs don't work for everyong.

On the other hand, CBT has other drawbacks, except high costs and the time it takes to attend it. “In its purest form, cognitive behavior therapy is designed to dispute negative thoughts, though it is not inherently trying to replace them with positive thoughts,” Layous says.

She explains that there is also a neural basis for why PAI functions. Brain-imaging techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) have shown that the reward circuitry of the brain is activated when PAI is practices. These circuits are rather inactive in depressed individuals.

“We think working on this reward-related circuitry targets a different part of the brain than drug therapy. Maybe together, they could help people more than any one could help apart. It could serve as a really good complement to what is already being done,” Layous concludes, as quoted by LiveScience.