I don’t think depression is a universal root-cause diagnosis so I’m inclined to agree.

I’ve been diagnosed clinically several times in life with depression and the pills never did anything for me. Sometimes exercise worked, sometimes it was of little or no use.

With retrospect, all of my episodes of depression were a function of environment. As a child, growing up in a broken home situation and bad school environment, of course there is going to be depression. Life sucks. Further, no pill or weight lifting schedule is going to fix that either. Only breaking out of that situation will.

As an adult, I’ve absolutely had and broken out of a long episode of depression with exercise. Bad breakup, startup failure, then introduce chronic drinking and subsequent weight gain. Guess what, cutting back on drinking, bicycling to work 30 minutes each way, doing martial arts in the evenings, it was a great fix. It enhanced self image, added a new community of positive people, and broke a cycle of depression.

And I'm the counter anecdotal case of your anecdotal case.

I have a page long list of failed psychiatric regimens that included drugs alone and drugs combined with talk therapy. None of them effective.

I won't say that I'm cured of depression now or will ever be. But a strict and persistent exercise routine lessened it to the point where I can function day to day. This was never achieved with presrciption drugs or therapy (of which I have developed a dim opinion).

And you think the effects of drugs is universal?

Exercise is a side effect free treatment that works for some people so it’s worth a shot because it sometimes works.

Depression isn't monocausal so it'd be far too simple for it to have a single solution.

But in general, humans just work better when we're regularly putting our bodies under reasonable physical load.

I'm a non-competitive athlete, and yes exercise can help depression, but no, it will not be sufficient for anything but your mild to average case of it.

Exercise is a crucial part of dealing with it, but it is not a panacea.

> I also question the universality of it.

The article doesn't claim exercise is a universally effective treatment, so whose statements are you questioning?

There's no universality on anything linked to mental health.

Yeah, any of these studies that show “X works better than Y” are inevitably operating on averages. Not everyone will respond the same way. Not to mention that the very existence of the structure and human interaction required for these studies makes a huge difference in their outcomes.

I hesitate to ask but what is your gender? I think there may be very gender specific effects in this comparison. I would also be very curious the type and intensity of exercise and whether you had comorbidities that impact ability to train (obesity, low testosterone, etc).