Interview: Yoga and mental health

For the past few years, we have done quite a bit of work in this area. For people with fairly severe mental illness, yoga can be quite beneficial as an add-on to the medicines that they are already taking, but in a few cases, yoga can be a medicine in itself. We have had people who refused to take medication and were looking for alternative methods of treatment. With such people, we have had a good success rate with yoga as a sole treatment option. The percentage of such people though, is on the lower side. Most people practice yoga as an add-on treatment to their existing treatment strategies such as medication, psychotherapy and other treatments.

There is quite a bit of evidence in terms of publication as well as meta-analytic reviews, which basically give a better idea because they take a lot of data and combine it in a meaningful form. Individual studies are difficult because single studies may not give the evidence required for people who want to know whether it works, or how well it works. So in the last 10 years, maybe, there is quite a bit of evidence, both from India and from abroad, for yoga as a complementary treatment for disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. Much of the research work has been conducted in our own institution, NIMHANS, where we have actually published more than 25 research papers in various national and international journals, to show that yoga works well as a complementary treatment for various disorders in mental illness. Most of it is available on the internet for free. I would refer to a recent supplement of the Indian Journal of Psychiatry: July-September 2013 edition, which gives quite a good example of how yoga can be a complementary therapy for multiple mental disorders.

It is a very interesting question and this question is asked in many forums. There are two issues we need to look at here. One: If you ask many yoga teachers or people who practice in yoga schools, they don't consider yoga as a therapy in that sense. They insist that yoga is a lifestyle which has to be lived and not looking at yoga with any specific benefits for any illness. Rather, they look at a way of helping the individual reach his or her goal, which could be salvation, mental health, or physical health. Yoga as a therapy is a fairly recent construct, maybe in the last two or three decades. Before that yoga was looked at as a purely lifestyle activity. That is one major issue from the yoga point of view.

Yoga as a treatment as I said earlier, is still being looked at as a preliminary kind of evidence. Now whether yoga works early or late, we have to look into the genesis of psychiatric disorders itself. We also very well know that in most psychiatric disorders, the earlier the treatment is started, the better the prognosis or the outcome for the individual. This is fairly well established evidence in most psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, depression, and OCD. Now if yoga works, theoretically, it should work better in the early stages. Now, this has not been proven yet, but going by the logic, it should. If you look at the other way how does yoga work, that's a very important and interesting question that scientists around the world are now trying to answer. We believe that it basically helps the innate repair mechanism of the human brain to do its job more efficiently. In other words, it helps the body repair itself. Here I am talking specifically of the brain. So even this logic we see that the earlier it is started in the course of the illness, the more effective it should be.