Is Exercise as Effective as Antidepressants?

The claim that exercise matches antidepressants traces to a real U.S. trial where supervised walking and medication produced identical remission rates: roughly one in two. But the fourth group, taking an inert pill, saw one in three improve, and that gap barely cleared statistical significance. The newest meta-analysis rates the exercise-versus-medication comparison as "low confidence," built on too few trials. John J. Ratey's Spark and Kelly McGonigal's The Joy of Movement offer deeper dives, yet neither resolves the core problem: in exercise trials, nobody is blind.

You'll learn:

- Why the placebo group's improvement is twice that of drug trials

- How publication bias inflates small, striking studies

- What "failing to find a difference" actually proves