Physical activity is not a adequate treatment for depression

BMJ: Facilitated physical activity as a treatment for depressed adults: randomised controlled trial

Conclusions

The addition of a facilitated physical activity intervention to usual care did not improve depression outcome or reduce use of antidepressants compared with usual care alone.

Who would have thought? You can't simply "walk off" your depression. Now what does that tell us about GET, which seems to be equally common sense to psycho-quacks?

The "Gold Standard" in ME/CFS Care

Currently, when the question comes to what ME/CFS* patients should receive as treatment, it is recommend that "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" (CBT) and "Graded Exercise Therapy" (GET) be used – this was supposedly established in the "PACE trial".

Now, which data was collected in the "PACE trial" with regards to recovery rates and positive outcomes, when CBT and GET are used to treat ME/CFS?

“The requested data relating to recovery rates and positive outcomes do not exist. That is to say that such analyses have not been done and there is no intention to do so. The reason for this is that the analysis strategy has changed from the original protocol.”

Come again?

There is no data on recovery rates and positive outcomes with CBT and GET as therapy?

So this is the gold standard in ME/CFS care?

This is the best that these psychology-quacks can come up with?

As the Americans say: You gotta be shittin me.

--

* ME/CFS is an syndrome, most possibly a group of several disease, with demonstrable primary physical pathologies not due to deconditioning nor caused by mental/psychological problems.

On CBT and GET

The CBT that is a defacto mandatory therapy for UK ME/CFS patients that want continuing medical care and at least limited disability benefits is nothing like coaching in my understanding. The behavioral therapy you describe could certainly be of use to ME/CFS patients that almost universally need to come to grips with new energy limitations and acquire time management skills to marshal their energies and survive. That is not what is being offered.

Instead, patients are subjected to therapy methods that are at best dishonest, and in the worse case coercive and stressful. It can be even physically harmful if combined with GET therapy. The CBT for UK patients has its roots in "reparative therapy", as I mentioned upstream in this thread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy

In reparative therapy, the operant reality construct is that gay patients are mentally ill and need to be repaired by "conditioning" methods. In CBT for CFS patients, the operant reality is that CFS patients are mentally ill and have "deconditioned" themselves. They need to be repaired by "conditioning" methods. If you add coercion in the form of Christian "guilting" of a homosexual patient, or the withholding of care and benefits in the case of CFS, then it is not helpful to the patients in the long view of things.

Sadly, the powers that be and vested interests in the UK have chosen to devote almost all available funding to CBT and GET therapies in the context of ME/CFS treatment and research efforts. It is the only game in town.