14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators at the University of California in Riverside (UCR) say that depressed people who tend to practice positive activities oftentimes exhibit a decrease in the severity of their symptoms. The team adds that this could constitute a cheap, alternative way of handling the debilitating condition.
Scientists did not arrive at this approach over night. Several decades of social psychology research went into figuring out how the human brain reacts to stimuli coming from within. Indeed, the brain appears to be more capable of healing itself than antidepressants medication are.
At the same time, positive activities reduce depression without any of the common side-effects associated with drugs. The UCR experts arrived at this conclusion after collaborating closely with colleagues at the Duke University Medical Center.
This treatment approach was dubbed Positive Activity Interventions (PAI). Details of how it works and what its full effects are were published in the latest issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, PsychCentral reports.
Some of the activities experts tout include counting the blessings each person got, trying to be optimistic regardless of what life throws at you, as well as performing random acts of kindness, sometimes to complete strangers.
The sense of satisfaction and self-accomplishment that people get from doing this is invaluable, researchers say, and is something that can be instilled even in patients who do not respond to drugs, or refuse to take them altogether.
Using this technique is a lot cheaper than buying medication. At the same time, it's less time-consuming to employ, and is capable of producing results nearly overnight. Patients feel no stigma from using it, and there are literally no side-effects involved.
At a time when more than 16 million people in the United States (100 million people around the world) suffer from depression, a low-cost, DIY method of reducing depression is more than welcome, doctors say. What's more, about 70 percent of all depression cases worldwide go untreated.
“The positive activities themselves aren’t really new. After all, humans have been counting their blessings, dreaming optimistically, writing thank-you notes, and doing acts of kindness for thousands of years,” Kristin Layous explains.
“What’s new is the scientific rigor that researchers have applied to measuring benefits and understanding why they work,” concludes the UCR graduate student, who was also the lead author of the new paper.