Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Can Yoga Help Mental Illness?

GO INTERACTIVE WELLNESS, Flickr, Creative Commons

Treatment for mental illness that is safe, healthy, and not too expensive can be hard to find. But new research from  Duke University suggests that yoga might be effective in treating certain psychiatric symptoms.

Murali Doraiswamy is a professor of psychiatry at Duke Medical Center and is one of three authors in arecent study  that systematically looks at 100 studies around the world investigating the effects of yoga on mood disorders. Doraiswamy said he and his colleagues found, "in more serious types of mild clinical depression, regular yoga practiced 3 times a week by itself can act like as effectively as an anti-depressant."

Duraiswamy says larger-scale national mega studies will be needed to put yoga on the same footing as pharmaceuticals. The study appears in this month's journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Fed up with the frigid winters of her native state, Catherine was lured to North Carolina in 2006. She grew up in Wisconsin where she spent much of her time making music and telling stories. Prior to joining WUNC, Catherine hosted All Things Considered and classical music at Wisconsin Public Radio. She got her start hosting late-nights and producing current events talk shows for the station's Ideas Network. She later became a fill-in talk show host and recorded books for WPR's popular daily program, Chapter A Day.
Related Stories
More Stories