COU292: Depression has a ubiquitous influence affecting all ages and both sexes, earning its place as the second most prominent: Research Methods in Counselling Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Depression has a ubiquitous influence affecting all ages and both sexes, earning its place as the second most prominent disease in the world as well as one of the leading causes of suffering for older adults. Due to the frequent occurrence of somatic symptoms concealing the disease, depression is often underdiagnosed and undertreated.

Depressive symptoms are defined as sadness, melancholy, or a feeling of hopelessness and include feelings of sadness that are accompanied by altered mood and somatic symptoms that are not sufficient in severity to lead to a diagnosis of clinical depression. The prevalence of DS in community-dwelling elderly adults is 10.4–39.3%. DS decreases the quality of life and increases the risk of suicide leading to a higher mortality rate.

According to previous research, the two effective strategies to decrease depression among older adults include exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy. Wright and Cattan (2009) advocated for exercise to decrease depression due to the accessibility and low cost of the activity, even drawing attention to the fact that exercise is free from adverse side effects when done sensibly.

Exercise also leads to an increase of neurotransmitters available in the brain, which have been diminished by depression. A meta-analysis study to determine the effectiveness of exercise in the treatment of adult people with a diagnosis of depression by Mead et al.targeted 23 trials and found that the pooled standardized mean difference was 0.82, revealing a large clinical effect.

Conversely, when including the three trials with adequate allocation concealment, intention to treat analysis, and blinded outcome assessment, the pooled SMD was 0.42, indicating a moderate and non-significant effect. Mead et al. suggested that more methodologically robust trials should be performed to obtain more accurate estimates of effect sizes.