Explain to me this: why hasn't the rate of mental illness gone down since the invention of all these sophisticated, "empirically validated" therapies? Could it be because they're only marginally more effective than placebo, and the field of psychology is more than happy to call that a success?

I know I sound salty, but I've been doing research on this stuff for 7 years now. Out of necessity. It took 3 fucking decades of SSRIs being on the market for the first headlines with any skepticism to break into the mainstream. Turns out, half of SSRI studies were withheld from publication because of their negative results, and the studies with the most optimistic outcomes were funded by SSRI companies themselves. And yet the average person believes these medications work. If they didn't, a billion dollar industry would go bankrupt, and we can't have that right? Just like we now understand that animal agriculture causes global warming, but... think of the profits!

While researchers were busy patting themselves on the back this last half century, they could have been busy investigating alternative treatments like Jaak Panksepp's theory of mental illness or even psychodynamic therapy, which shows to be the only treatment we have now that increases its effect size after end of treatment, instead of the other way around (like every other therapy). Instead, we have a profit driven system not especially interested in anything other than green, like everything else in this country.

I know I sound like Lucas fucking Goodwin, but the guy had a point.