Study on yoga for mental illness

Meera Balasubramaniam, Shirley Telles and P. Murali Doraiswamy examined the effect of yoga on selected mental disorders.

To do this, they looked at 16 randomized, controlled studies that dealt with yoga and mental illness and were related to depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, perception, memory or attention.

The three researchers from the USA and India were able to demonstrate a potential benefit of yoga for depression, as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy for schizophrenia, for children with ADHD and for sleep disorders.

For cognitive and eating disorders, the studies examined produced contradictory results. There was a lack of studies that investigated yoga for prevention, relapse prevention or in comparison to conventional medicine.

Such studies would be desirable. However, the review suggests a positive impact of yoga on depression, sleep disorders and as a complementary treatment.