[TeMPOraL]

On the other hand, you may get all of these things right, and still experience no improvement.

Personally, I'm starting to feel that most "diet and exercise" advice is just a subtle way of showing a middle finger. Sending someone on a wild goose chase, thus making them go away. In my circles, I've never heard of a single case where a medical problem - whether physical or mental - was solved by changing diet or a more active lifestyle. The closest I've seen was shuffling meals around because of a bad interaction with a drug.

Keeping sleep, diet and exercise truly optimal, against challenges of the modern world and already compromised physical or mental state is a full-time job on its own. Even if it could help - which I doubt - few people have enough time and energy to go this route. Hell, finding the optimal balance in the first place is essentially a full-time N=1 research work.

Pills are good thing. The right ones, administered in correct doses, under supervision of medical professionals - they work wonders. Modern medicine in many ways a miracle. Being able to function again, to feel good, to spend quality time with people you love, can be as simple as popping a lozenge at appropriate time. It's infinitely better than structuring your entire life around managing your condition with "natural" remedies.

To be clear: I'm not saying we should be medicating ourselves for everything. Not all drugs are good, and all drugs have side effects. They're still very crude tools. I'm trying to offer a counterpoint to the (what I feel is) growing trend of rejecting modern medicine just because it smells too much of industry (as if that was a bad thing). In my view, the problem with medication is just that it's not good enough. But it's getting better, year after year.

[samatman]

What you're doing here is exhibiting the shadow side of people who reject medicine and insist that diet and health are the only valid treatment for mental and physical malaise.

Lifting heavy weights is the only thing which keeps me sane. It might not work for you, but unless you've tried it, you don't know that.

None of my business if you do or don't, and a six week commitment to something like Stronglifts 5x5 is pretty serious so I'm not surprised most people don't try it.

But don't conflate it with hopping on a treadmill or exercise bike, or just pushing some dumbbells around once or twice. Heavy, repeated, and compound lifts are uniquely effective for me, and for a remarkable number of other people.

It's not a fuck you, man. That's insulting.

[speapr]

Perhaps interventions in diet, exercise and sleep and 'talking cures' such as therapy are both required for a real improvement in mental health.

So there are lots of people who claim that effort spent on general health did not solve any of their mental health issues, and others who claim that therapy was useless because they still had the same bad sleep and diet patterns and generally felt physically crappy.

They are both right.