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I went to the trouble of writing an effort post somewhere that was read by like 8 people, so I'll just reproduce the primary bit, and tack on additional commentary at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy
The bolded section is the one I can't easily verify, at least not when it's 9 am and I've been up all night studying.
Specifically regarding CBT, I found the following metanalysis-
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23870719/
And when speaking of CBT as applied to more psychiatric conditions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/
Addressing the specific claims of similar efficacy to the forms of therapy based on pseudoscientific principles:
In the particular case of BPD, after talking to @Throwaway05 I looked into the actual benefit of DBT, and was surprised to see that it was genuinely far more effective than I expected. Somewhere around the ballpark of 50% success rates in curbing symptoms and letting quite a few of them lead entirely unremarkable and functional lives. If 50% sounds underwhelming, wait till you hear the typical cure rates I'm used to.
So:
A clear no. The evidence base is nigh unimpeachable, even if, as discussed above, the most bullshit insanity inducing forms like Freudian or Lacanian psychotherapy still beat placebo.
My personal working hypothesis is that therapy acts as a decent substitute for a friend, a non-judgemental and understanding one who has seemingly endless time to listen to your problems, and is forbidden, on the pain of losing the way they make a living, from disclosing your troubles. Unfortunately, quite a few people genuinely lack actual good friends, so even such as ersatz substitute has notable effects.
This is an entirely different question from the fad we've been having for quite a few years of "therapy culture", or the insistence of people to co-opt/misuse therapy speak to lend their bullshit legitimacy. Then again, there are practising Freudian and Lacanian therapists, and few other people seem to have the same burning urge I have to burn their houses down. Even then, I must concede they beat placebo, as well as the dead horse that is repressed penis envy.
Anyway, therapy seems to beat placebo, and works synergistically with drugs, even if you cynically notice that therapy based off nonsense does much the same thing as more considered approaches, but it's not in dispute that it works. At least I have the consolation of being able to throw drugs at people instead of just talking at them as a licensed shrink in training, for all the quibbling about if SSRIs work, ain't nobody claiming their ADHD isn't being helped when they're zooted up on stimulants.
To conclude, is therapy helpful when administered by someone who knows what the fuck they're doing? Yes.
Are they/us responsible for random idiots using it as an obfuscation technique? Not really, though the upper echelons of HR are often staffed by people with degrees in psychology where I'm at.
Is it possibly a net negative for the set of {all people subjected to mealy mouthed terminology}? No clue, but you asked about the actually mentally ill, and you have my answer. No surprise that a few of them pick up on the lingo.
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
That is hopelessly confounded. For most of history, the only treatment for mental illnesses was beatings, blood letting, the asylum, or maybe some mercury if it was syphilitic.
They barely had the conceptual framework to understand mental illness in the first place.
Besides, we know that the stressors of modernity are bad for mental health in of themselves, just look at social media and dating apps for recent examples. Atomization of families, loss of the (false) comfort from religion and so on.
Not everything is a mass psychogenic illness. I would bet a great deal of money that things like depression, BPD, bipolar disorder and the like aren't. And therapy helps, at least when we now recognize and formally diagnose those who could need it.
My own ADHD would certainly have gone undiagnosed, as would so many other conditions (not that therapy does anything there, the drugs help).
I feel like my citations speak for themselves here. Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete? I'd be curious to hear how that's not the case.
I'm not defending therapy culture. It's infantilizing to say the least. But actual therapy works well enough that we often consider it the firstline treatment before resorting to the funny drugs. And that's a considered decision made by multiple independent bodies, on the basis of a great deal of evidence.
Wouldn't it be funny if beatings, bloodletting, alcohol and prayer actually worked?
Imagine life in 1300s Europe. There's a 30-50% chance your child will die as an infant. You might have chevauchee Englishmen/Frenchmen/Germans running around looting and killing. Sudden illness could randomly kill you. You likely work long days in the fields, famine is an everpresent danger especially if the lord decides to take your food. You might be drafted to fight in some war where you'll wait between bursts of extremely gorey, personal violence and interminable waiting as disease picks your comrades off. If you sin you face a very real and universally accepted penalty of eternal hellfire. Esoteric doctrinal differences to the church? Welcome to a world of blood and fire, brought to you by your local crusaders. Alternately, if you're in range of the Mongols you can experience blood and fire without needing any heresy. The less said about Meso-America the better.
This is a pretty stressful lifestyle! WEIRD people don't have any of these problems, only social alienation and other such high-Maslow issues. I won't dismiss the psychic damage inflicted by Microsoft PowerPoint but it's on a totally different level to ubuiquitous deaths in childbirth. Yet there's loads of anxiety, depression and so on today.
Prayer probably does work at least a little bit, and beatings can at least straighten out the crowd with a mental illness downstream of refusing to be normal.
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