Abstract
Background: Because the prevalence of mental health concerns is high and access or full responsiveness to pharmacological or psychotherapeutic treatment for many individuals is low, there has been increased interest in yoga as a potential therapy for many mental health concerns. Approach: We synthesize and critique current research on the efficacy of yoga relative to pharmacological approaches for anxiety disorders, mood disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and eating disorders. Results: Yoga has been tested mostly as a complementary treatment to standard psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches. Findings from efficacy trials largely support the notion that yoga can help reduce symptoms of many psychiatric conditions, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms, above and beyond the effects achieved by standard pharmacological treatments alone; however, most evidence is of poor to moderate quality. Plausible transdiagnostic bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of yoga’s therapeutic effects have been advanced but remain untested. Conclusions: While results should be considered preliminary until more rigorous evidence is available, yoga appears to have the potential to provide many people suffering with psychiatric symptoms additional relief at relatively little cost. Yoga may be a viable complementary therapy to psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches for people with mental health challenges.
Highlights
Recent study of 226 adult patients with a primary DSM-5 generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) diagnosis were randomized to a 12-week trial of Kundalini yoga, cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT), or stress education [23]
Any general conclusions drawn from our review must be tempered by acknowledging the lack of rigor of this body of research, and we discuss in some detail these limitations below; the extant studies have fairly consistently yielded findings suggesting that yoga may be a helpful addition to first-line therapies for people diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders
Yoga may be an appealing option for many people who are hesitant about psychiatric medications or psychotherapy
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In the past few decades, many so-called alternative medical modalities have been subjected to scientific scrutiny to determine their value in treating a variety of health conditions Those shown in clinical research to be of some value are often integrated into standard psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches to provide additional potential therapeutic benefit. To increase our understanding of the efficacy of yoga for mental health conditions, we provide an overview of the broad body of empirical literature, focusing on studies of asana-based yoga, which often includes elements of meditation and breathwork. Extant published reviews and meta-analyses of yoga’s efficacy for people with mental health diagnoses have generally not considered the other treatments in which patients or participants may be engaged (e.g., psychiatric medicine and psychotherapy). We did not conduct a systematic review, we endeavored to include all published studies conducted with reasonable rigor that addressed the issue of efficacy with these five categories of disorders
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