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Any form of depression that requires treatment, in particular major depression, is recognized as a severe medical condition that can be disabling and in some cases fatal, since depressed people have a significant suicide risk. Thus, any advice on how to treat depression is medical advice.
Moreover, you talk about experience with your clients, and if I understand correctly, you actually work as some sort of depression counselor. Your website even says "It’s like therapy, but better." Therefore, you are indeed giving professional medical advice that is not based on scientific evidence.
Sorry if this comes across rude, but it seems to me that what you are doing meets the definition of quackery.
I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, depression is very hard to treat and the only treatments that have shown some effectiveness supported by scientific evidence are antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy, and AFAIK, even antidepressants show a weak effect.
EDIT:
Just found this article that makes the point much better than me: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/10/01/ignoring-the-evidence.html
The old school psych industry generally doesn't work. I went through a decade of professional therapy with professional therapists that did nothing for me, and only had things turn around once I started getting into other forms of help such as cutting edge Buddhist related philosophies such as life coaching. I actually help people when people who go through our "legal" fucked up system generally don't improve and often get worse. Most information out there is misleading and incomplete, including professional studies. The psych industry is a mess. The DSM is terrible, most therapists don't even agree on diagnoses. I was misdiagnosed personally for depression and given a drug that caused me to become manic, in a way that shifted my baseline psychological state permanently and caused me very bad problems for many years, as the result of taking the advice of a very prestigious professional psychiatrist who works at Stanford.
Basically, the whole field is fucked. I'm doing and sharing what I find most effective, which I actually do get results from. You can look at the testimonials on my site if you want, it seems you found them. I'm collecting more testimonials. I know what I am doing is not perfect, but I think its among the best, and that is the best I can hope for, and I would rather help people than not do anything because I'm waiting for perfection that is never going to come while people are suffering.
Sorry about the ranting, rough night.
If you work with people who didn't find the standard interventions helpful, and they find your assistance helpful, that doesn't mean your thing works better - it means it works better on a group filtered for finding standard interventions unhelpful.
False dichotomy, it's evidence for both. One conclusion might be false and the other true but other arguments are required for you to get to that point.
Yes, it is probably evidence for both, depending somewhat on what people's beliefs are about how those in the subset likely differ from the others in the superset with regards to relative response to interventions.
However, I wouldn't say Alicorn was presenting a dichotomy. Sure, I would have said "that doesn't necessarily mean" in the first case and "but it does mean" in the second just for extra specificity but I wouldn't say that is required.
I don't understand how it isn't a dichotomy.
My group is mixed. Some didn't find standard interventions helpful, some found them somewhat helpful and then improved more working with me. Its actually more a filter of people who think similarly enough to me to hire me. But I have also worked with random friends of friends recommendations who improved, who I think are far less like the normal cluster that is likely to find me.
I think this is close, and fortunately it is (roughly speaking) the same kinds people who are likely to read your post and take it on board. Others would be more likely to gloss over it because it isn't as salient to them.
Yeah, and I sunk into depression despite over a decade of various lifehacking philosophical gizmos, and you don't hear me saying that all of it is fucked and we should all just get on the happy pills. (You do hear me gushing overmuch about said happy pills.) If we're trading anecdotes all we're going to learn is that lots of stuff sometimes work but everything usually fails.
Obviously you're helping people, so go you, and obviously you're helping people more than conventional therapy because conventional therapy is just paying someone to kvetch at them regularly and that can only possibly help if you have no friends to do that with. (The advantage is that you can be suicidal and it's their problem because it's their job, whereas if a friend notices you're suicidal it's a suicide threat and you are a bad evil manipulative person and I should stop reading Captain Awkward.)
But I see no evidence that your coaching should be a first resort for mild depression, rather than a n-th resort after conventional means have failed or proven insufficient. And for major depression (where meds are much more useful than for mild depression anyway), what kind of presentation of major depression leaves you able to make big life changes?
Some of the conventional therapists are good to chat with and making it an economic transaction rather than talking about all the negative stuff with your friends can reduce the extent that you are a drain on them or the relationships. Trade is a wonderful thing!
As the article I linked points out, the actual penetration of science-based psychotherapy even among professionals is low, and certainly it was even lower one decade ago. Hence, your experience is far from surprising.
However, the proper course of action is to push for science-based psychotherapy, not to go for DIY or New Age ("cutting edge Buddhist related philosophies") systems that have possibly even less scientific support than mainstream methods.
Sure, you have experience that your method works. Freud had experience that his psychoanalysis worked. So did Jung. And Moniz and Freeman with their lobotomy. They even got testimonials and Moniz even won a Nobel Prize. But these practices were not supported by scientific evidence, and they ultimately proved ineffective and, in the case of lobotomy, actively harmful.
Beware of sponteneous regression (1/3 of mental health patients get better even without therapy), the placebo effect and the confirmation bias (researchers, even professional scientists, tend to rememeber favorable outcomes and forget unfavorable ones). There is a good reason why medical experimental protocols are so strict and complex.
No problem, best wishes.
I do not know of any evidence of Freud or others using techniques that work. Do you know of any information that they published about patients having improvement with specific metrics and periods of time?
I do push for research and learning. I also am not going to sit on my ass and do nothing when I have techniques that I have witnessed for myself and measured as working. Life is not perfect. Science is great, but is really really far from getting a really good model of human psychology, and therapists are terrible at implementing, as we have repeatedly agreed. Doing the best with what what I can, is the most honorable thing I know how to do. I care much more about creating maximal utility in the world than being right and not making mistakes. The implication of your suggested strategy is that we should all sit around and twiddle our thumbs until perfection arrives, perhaps aside from some people in labs, who we are going to put all of our faith in humanity in.
[...]
Reread and noted you answered that they don't have metrics. It is important to note that as I have said in other places, I am taking my own metrics. So I have evidence for myself that what I am doing is working. I may participate in creating studies and publishing eventually, I would definitely like to see it happen, but leading a study is not what I currently consider lowest hanging fruit for my contributions to humanity and taking care of myself at this point in time. Also, there are studies that are being done on Internal Family Systems and other things of that nature currently.