The psychology of exercise for clinical populations: exercise can be good for you even when you are ill

Exercise was invented and used to clean the body when it was too full of harmful things. Christobal Mendez, 1500-1561

(Berryman 2000)

This chapter aims to review the role of physical activity and exercise in the treatment of a variety of clinical populations. Anxiety and depression have been excluded from this chapter because they are comprehensively reviewed in Chapter 9, but other mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and substance abuse are included. We use the American College of Sports Medicine’s (ACSM) classification of disease and disability as a framework and examples of psychological issues for specific conditions from each category have been given. Specifically, this chapter will:

ability ● provide examples of psychological issues for each category in the ACSM framework,

including:

populations.