If you switch on any popular daily talk show, you’ll likely encounter a semi-regular section dedicated to mental health. The hosts are always so understanding. Their body language is evocative, they speak to guests with confidence as if to transmit your wellbeing through the airwaves. It’s relentless with positivity.
A feature of these discussions is how exercise and sport can help people cope with mental health problems. You might see a recovering addict explain their emotional journey from despair to weightlifting, or an Olympic rower imparting their experience with depression, backed by footage of them winning medals at international tournaments.
Exercise is a ‘popular’ part of mental health discourse, so much so that it dwarfs discussion on other therapies and coping mechanisms to be a frustrating keystone of how society treats mental health. This isn’t to say, with certainty, that exercise and sport is a pointless task for mental health. But casting it as the primary method of treatment is irresponsible and unrepresentative of people’s struggles.
For one, it fits itself into the model of popular discourse which sees depression and anxiety as the only mental health conditions that exist. There’s a vast number of illnesses for which these two may only be symptoms as part of a much more complex set. For example, trauma and stress recovery may feature depressive episodes or symptoms of anxiety, but their root in a person’s life can be more difficult to simply call depression. The same can be said for psychotic illnesses, practically ignored by the mainstream out of misunderstanding, prejudice or apathy. Because of its uniqueness, it’s wrong to expect exercise and sport will dramatically lift people out of their problems, when it may not be effective in the first place.
Crucially, exercise may even be a feature of a person’s mental health problems. Agoraphobia, body dysmorphia or eating disorders may see exercise as a symptom of their condition, liable to make it worse. Suggesting that going to the gym or joining a tennis club will provide holistic, undeniable boons to a person’s wellbeing may well be doing the opposite. In my own case, I suffer with both low body confidence and paranoia, making exercise in a public setting very difficult. I love swimming and riding an exercise bike, but because these activities require me to plunge into groups of people, often much more fit and toned than myself, I just can’t get myself to do it.
Exercise as a mental health therapy assumes it will have physical and psychological benefits. But what if a person has a physical disability? On these talk shows there’s always a sports pro or wellness coach telling us to “get out there”, compromising to patronise us with “even if it’s just for half an hour”. It assumes that everyone with mental health problems will physically be able to treat themselves, when so many people are unable to go for a walk. It borders on ableism that this central part of mental health discourse seems to forget that not everyone is physically able enough to do it.
But this all links to a much wider problem: society’s perception of mental health. If the mainstream discussion seen on television, radio and in journalism is so heavily invested into one form of therapy, it creates an reckless, false narrative. Exercise may not work in the slightest for some people. For others, they may see huge, life-changing benefits from it. It’s not a zero-sum game.
Exercise is also linked invariably to wanting a result or progress to a self-defined target. It might be about matching times on a lap, or seeing weight disappear in a mirror. For people with long-term mental illness, it’s simply not a case of meeting and beating targets – it’s about self-preservation. Exercise may work towards that goal for some people, yes, but it shouldn’t be seen as the ultimate treatment to difficult problems.
It’s not correct nor is it fair to presume exercise will be a cure or relief to our mental health problems. Despite its huge importance in society, popular discourse still hasn’t grasped the idea that mental health is a totally unique experience – not everyone’s condition will be the same. It shouldn’t be automatically assumed that ‘mental health’ just means ‘depression’, which opens it up to even harsher debates around public perceptions.
If popular discourse is to improve, it would do well to remember than not everyone can easily step into running shoes. With NHS waiting lists for CBT, counselling and psychology beyond reason, maybe some daytime talk shows would do well to talk about this feature of our public services, combatting stigma around therapy and challenging why it takes so long to get help in the first place. If this were the case, I wonder if their positive discussions would be accompanied by the same important caveat I’m expressing here.