Clinical Guidelines: Lifestyle-Based Mental Health Care

Our partners the Food and Mood Centre and Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine have worked collaboratively over the last two years to develop clinical practice guidelines that provide clinicians with up-to-date, evidence-based information on the management of major depressive disorder (MDD) using lifestyle-based approaches.

These Guidelines are world-first in their nature and reach. You can find them here published under the title Clinical Guidelines for Lifestyle-Based Mental Health Care for Depression in the World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

Accompanying these guidelines are consumer resources to help those living with MDD understand the latest evidence into lifestyle-based care for MDD. You can find the consumer resources here.

“It’s time to attend to the roots of health. Lifestyle interventions are largely safe, free, and culturally appropriate, and should be foundational and non-negotiable in today’s prescription of mental health care and whole-of-person wellbeing. The evidence-based guidelines are an approach that combats the need for the drastic increase in prescriptions we’ve seen recently, especially over the COVID-19 period. The power of individuals and communities has been largely ignored in favour of decades of pharmaceutical-centric healthcare. The announcement of the lifestyle-based mental health care guidelines is the Lifestyle Medicine approach to mental health care. This is Lifestyle Medicine.” 

Dr Sam Manger, President of Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine