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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.
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.
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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.