Short response: Check out the Cochrane Library on mental health. (Browse by Topics in the left-hand side, Expand, then click on Mental Health - as of just now there are 406 entries.)

Evaluating healthcare interventions is hard. The gold standard is a randomised controlled trial (RCT), published in a peer reviewed journal. But there are all sorts of problems with single trials, some of which you allude to here. It's a really great idea to do a systematic review of all published trials and combine the good ones to get the best evidence available.

Doing this well is really hard - you need specialist expertise in the specific area to correctly interpret the primary literature (the RCTs), and specialist skills in systematic reviewing (as with RCTs themselves, there are many obvious and subtle issues about how to do them well). And it takes ages.

Luckily, there's an international collaboration of people, called the Cochrane Collaboration who get together to do this sort of thing, and have been beavering away for 20 years.

Unless you have significant resources, you are unlikely to do better on any topic than the latest available Cochrane Review. And if you do have significant resources, you're likely to do well to start with it.

When a health issue pops up for me or someone I care about, I jump straight for the Cochrane review (and also any relevant guidelines and protocols, but that's a tier down the evidence quality pyramid), and it's like I'm getting a well thought-through briefing from the world's experts on what we currently know about what works and what doesn't.

I love it.

As a postscript, there is a whole field of healthcare informatics that looks at how to find good academic papers on a particular issue - I once ran a whole course on the topic (and related ones). The shortcut answer is 'use Cochrane'; the long spadework answer is 'search Medline'.

Good luck.

On the more personal question of what to do here to get the best treatment:

You care more about your condition than any medic, and so are motivated to spend more time on it. However, a general practitioner will have much more experience than you in diagnosing and treating mental health issues in the general population, and a specialist in mental health will know more about their area specifically than you can realistically hope to. (Unless you have a very rare condition, have the background chops to be a doctor, and put in an awful lot of work - which some people do.)

My guess is that you can almost certainly learn enough to be very helpful in decision-making about your condition. I wouldn't bother with the primary literature though - go for Cochrane Reviews and NICE Guidelines (here's the ones for mental health), and recent textbooks.

(NICE is a UK health body that basically takes the sort of information you get from Cochrane Reviews about what works and does some clever sums to work out what makes sense to do in yielding the highest number of QALYs given a fixed budget for healthcare.)

It's not always an easy ride - some clinicians have a morbid fear of patients who have 'consulted Dr Google' - and not without good reason.

But if you go along seeing yourself as an informed patient trying to engage in shared decision-making, most are happy about it in my experience. (Though my experience is limited to the UK.) If they're threatened by you mentioning this sort of evidence, I'd take it as a clear sign to change (if you possibly can).

It also puts you right on the sharp end of the distinction between what's true of a population and what's true for you.

If you haven't picked it up already, Feeling Good is a very good introduction to CBT. Also, according to its introduction, studies have shown that reading the book and doing the homework is surprisingly effective at treating depression on its own, in many cases. But maybe you already are up to speed on that stuff.

What's you goal? Do you want to help a specific person or do you want to gather general knowledge.

A clinical trial can tell you whether a treatment works for the average person. It however can't tell you whether it works for a specific person.

When it comes to helping a specific person with a serious issue the correct solution is often about trying multiple approaches. If you try 9 things and one works you win.

When it comes to therapist, it's important to have good chemistry with the therapist. If you don't fell comfortable with a certain therapist they probably won't be able to help you even if the practice a technique with has studies to back it up.

My personal readings on.. pretty much this exact subject .. is that there are a handful of effective drugs for specific - easily identifiable - problems and a larger number of drugs that mostly just calm you the heck down, and that misdiagnosis is a really major problem for both effective treatment and the development of treatments.

If you are bi-polar, then any doctor or shrink worth his salt is going to diagnose that correctly, and lithium will help. If you have a problem with a less clear cut set of symptoms? You are going to wind up with a diagnosis. Some diagnosis. Which may, or may not, be even remotely right, but now it is in your medical file, and all further symptoms are read through that filter. It is very rare that a diagnosis gets revised. This in turn makes developing treatments for mental issues a lot harder. When you are trying to develop a cure for a cancer or an infection, the group you test your drugs on will not in fact instead be suffering from fracking lupus. If you are testing a drug or other treatment for any given mental problem? Yhea, if you are really lucky, then half your test group has the actual problem you wish to treat.