Personally, I would never use a site like this for actual research. It's the internet! Anybody could go into any forum and claim to be diagnosed with something. We tend to treat it as fact since this is a self-help site. But for actual research, I would want higher standards of verification. Also (and this was addressed above), it would likely be unethical to 'study' people like this without their consent - particularly if this person was actually interacting with members on the site. So I wouldn't wonder too heavily about people you meet here lying to you (about that). One would hope that if any such studies were conducted, their 'research' would be raked through the coals.

I also think there are much better places to do mental health research. This site is more of a resource for those who want to vent and find somebody they can identify with. As far as 'what works' vs 'what doesn't' on a large scale, I haven't found much info. I have an interest in mental health on an intellectual level and have gotten very little from this place in those regards. I can see people with some interest stopping in and reading - you can't stop that. But it's just personal interest and not real research. If you didn't want that, you'd probably have to find a private group with stringent standards for joining. Like I said, this is the internet - and psychcentral is a site that tends to come up a lot on searches.