Family Life

01.06.10 | FL News Team

Feeling a bit blue? Take up jogging or curl up with a few self-help books rather than relying on antidepressants. That's according to new research out of the University of Pennsylvania that found mildly depressed people aren't substantially helped by taking happy pills. Researchers crunched data from a half-dozen studies of two popular antidepressants and found that they made a huge difference for the severely depressed. But people who started out only moderately depressed could've just as easily taken a sugar pill, researchers found.

 The study of 800 patients looked at a leading drug called Paxil and an older drug called Imipramine that's been around since the 1950s. Some 27-million Americans take antidepressants, spending ten-billion dollars in 2008 on the drugs. Researchers say the old stand-bys of exercise, psychotherapy and self-help literature are still good bets for banishing a simple case of the blues. Their findings are published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association."