The study is real and the participant figure is accurate. The Singh et al. umbrella review included 97 reviews, 1,039 trials and 128,119 participants, covering healthy adults, people with mental health disorders and people with various chronic diseases.

Its headline results: physical activity had medium effects on depression (median effect size −0.43, IQR −0.66 to −0.27), anxiety (median effect size −0.42, IQR −0.66 to −0.26) and psychological distress (effect size −0.60, 95% CI −0.78 to −0.42), compared with usual care. The largest benefits were seen in people with depression, HIV and kidney disease, pregnant and postpartum women, and healthy individuals. Interventions of 12 weeks or shorter were the most effective, and higher intensity activity was associated with greater symptom improvement.

The critical point: the phrase "1.5 times more effective than counselling or the leading medications" does not come from the paper's results. It comes from the University of South Australia's press release. In the paper itself, the authors wrote that the effect size reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms are "comparable to or slightly greater than the effects observed for psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy," and added that "future research to understand the relative effectiveness of [physical activity] compared with (and in combination with) other treatments is needed to confirm these findings."

That is a materially weaker statement than "beats" or "1.5 times more effective."

METHODOLOGY AND CONTEXT

• Design: Umbrella review (overview of systematic reviews with meta-analyses of RCTs). Twelve databases searched from inception to 1 January 2022. Screening and extraction done in duplicate.
• Comparator: The exercise effect sizes were measured against usual care or control conditions, not against counselling or medication. No head-to-head comparison of exercise versus therapy versus drugs was performed.
• How the "1.5x" figure was likely derived: By taking the review's median effect size for exercise (around 0.43) and comparing it to effect sizes reported in separate, unrelated meta-analyses of psychotherapy and antidepressants (typically cited in the 0.2 to 0.3 range). This is an indirect, cross-study comparison between different trials, different populations, different control conditions and different symptom measures. It is not evidence of superiority in the way a trial comparing the two directly would be.
• Quality of the underlying evidence: This is the most important omitted qualifier. 77 of the 97 included reviews had a "critically low" AMSTAR-2 score, the lowest possible rating for systematic review quality. The authors reported this themselves.
• Participant count: In umbrella reviews, the same trials frequently appear in multiple included reviews, so a headline participant total is generally not 128,000 distinct individuals. The paper reports the figure as the sum across included reviews.
• Publication date: February 2023. The post presents it as "New research" and "JUST DISCOVERED" in a September 2026 post.
• Contrary evidence: A 2026 umbrella review in Frontiers in Psychiatry focusing specifically on people with diagnosed depressive and anxiety disorders concluded that "umbrella-level evidence does not justify a general claim that exercise is superior to psychotherapy or antidepressant medication," and found that for diagnosed anxiety disorders the pooled estimate showed no clear benefit over selected controls (SMD = 0.02, 95% CI −0.20 to 0.24). It positioned exercise as best supported as an adjunctive component of care for depressive disorders.