I'm speaking from experience regarding mental illnesses and exercise. And I never discounted medication. Just that exercise is critically underprescribed, I'm fairly sure it would work better for milder cases compared to meds. Not to mention the other health benefits listed in the thread.

Same way an opioid pill is still prescribed in cases of cancer or severe pain. Just that there are probably better, milder alternatives that don't have as many side effects that could fit a lot of these people with milder problems.

I am 90% on your side (my experience is just that most doctors or therapists ask for my workout before considering meds). The truth is just that every mental illness is different.

So yeah, my takeaway is we should embrace workout, or maybe not necesserily straight workout, but just simple movement/exercise, more than meds. Especially here in germany I notice a very bad/prejudice mindset about doctors. I myself had very good experience. Either just because of pure luck or because I went to them, because I geniuenely believe that they are professionals who can help me. And that's what they (most of the time, not always) did.

I'm not saying that workouts will necessarily fix your social anxiety or any other mental disorder, but I don't know of anything else that necessarily will - meds and psychotherapy are also quite limited in their effectiveness. All I'm saying is people should at least consider that exercise (and more specifically - mild to rigorous cardio workouts) can be just as effective as psychotherapy / meds are. The evidence is there. I don't expect this understanding to come from therapists, this needs to come from society at large. Also, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, you can do both.

    > my social anxiety

I am considering trying some beta blockers. Did you try them? They seem like an interesting experiement.

Have you tried pineapple on your pizza? Seems like an interesting experiment